By Naomi Friedman, Staff Writer
The main commemoration of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, will be held at the front of the Death Gate of KL Auschwitz II-Birkenau. This marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the extermination camp located 30 miles west of Krakow, Poland.
The official website for the memorial, 70.auschwitz.org, prompts that this worldwide commemoration is to “show the survivors and the world that we—the post-war generation—have matured to take up our own responsibility for remembrance.”
If This Is a Man
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud,
Who does not know peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
– Primo Levi (1919-1987) Auschwitz Survivor, 1947