Remembering the Day, Facing the Legacy

Yom Hashoah on which we remember the monstrous destruction wreaked upon the Jewish people by the Nazis and their allies during the Holocaust always falls on the same day on the Hebrew calendar, the twenty-seventh day of Nissan.  On some years, however, this date falls on or near April 19th, the day eighty years ago when the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose up against their tormentors that succeeded in killing and incapacitating significant Nazi forces before succumbing to the inevitable.  This revolt is in fact included in the purpose and timing of this solemn day:  Yom HaShoah U’Mered haGetot,  Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and the Uprising of the Ghettos.  The shortening of the name of this day also has the effect of downplaying the intention that we remember that while so much of the story of the Holocaust is about the Jews murdered with methodical brutality, there are also the stories of resistance - the ghetto uprising, the revolts inside camps, partisans and others who fought to their last moments. 

These days in April mark other moments of terror and slaughter etched into the collective memory. The uprising was executed mere days before the planned liquidation of the Ghetto, which was intended to coincide with the birthday of Adolph Hitler.  On this day 30 years ago the FBI raided the Waco Texas stronghold of the armed white supremacist cult of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. That slaughter dictated the day on which Timothy McVeigh perpetrated the murder of 168 people in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  And four years after that, Columbine High School became the site of a mass shooting in which 13 people were murdered by two students who were killed as well. Columbine was at the time an event that was astonishing for its scale, weaponry, and location. Columbine was to become astonishing for the way in which it’s elements have become sickeningly commonplace in some combination or as a blueprint. 

The twenty-fourth anniversary of Columbine.  The twenty eighth and thirtieth of Oklahoma City and Waco.  A cluster orbiting the birthday of a man and a cause that infected the world with a particular strain of the most lethal hatred and catastrophic legacy.  A birthday that was to be held as the occasion of the deportation of the tens of  thousands of Jews left  Warsaw  and became instead the day on which the Jewish resistance had to be reckoned with before being overcome.  

To alter  the oft quoted phrase: history may not repeat itself but evil times echo

When we mark Yom Hashoah on its Hebrew date, whether or not it touches these days of April, we are called to forever guard the memory of the slain and to draw the inspiration of those who left their own mark on history — a legacy of never relenting before evil even, especially, facing the most abhorrent of days.