Israel marks Holocaust Memorial Day Honoring Survivors
Yaccov Zim lighting the memorial flame. Photo: Yad Vashem
They left the concentration camps and ghettos; hundreds of thousands of young teenagers that lived a lifetime of hell arrived in Israel where they created their safe haven with a living will to “never forget.” Today only eighty-thousand of these Holocaust survivors are still alive.
As Israel commemorates the memory of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, this year’s memorial seeks to try and document as many of the stories that can still be told. A new study published by the Brookdale Institute in Israel estimates that around thirty Holocaust survivors pass away each day – exacerbating the need for documentation. Today, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Authority database in Israel has collected over 3.8 million names and the task of making sure that every last person is commemorated is becoming harder each day.
One of these survivors is Yaccov ZIm, who was only 19 years old when the war broke out and today is a 90 year old man. Fleeing the ghetto in 1943, Yaacov was detained and taken to various labor camps, survived the grueling “death marches” and was eventually freed from Buchenwald concentration camp by the Soviet Army. A gifted artist, Yaccov paints his memories in an attempt to leave behind tangible evidence to his survival.
As Israel marks this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, it is the voices of the survivors that we should focus on: “Before their deaths, many of the murdered begged, ‘Do not forget us. Tell our story – tell the world, tell the following generations – how great our suffering was, how terrible the horror was, how great our sacrifice was’” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the hundreds of people gathered in Yad Vashem for the annual Holocaust vigil. “We owe the survivors a tremendous debt for their courage to return to life, to establish families, to contribute to building the country, and for their courage to speak out and tell their stories. It is only during the past several years that we have been doing more to help and make things easier for the survivors in their twilight years, and we will continue to do so.”
While it may be a national day of mourning it is also a time to look at all that we have achieved. Resurrected from the ashes of Auschwitz, the Jewish people have created a thriving nation: “Faith is what enabled us to rebuild our state, which today has the largest number of Jews known to history. A state with great scientific aptitude; whose economy is thriving; whose security is steadfast; whose culture inspires emotion; whose democratic rule brings freedom to all its citizens, regardless of creed, nation or class,” proclaimed President Shimon Peres, “There has never been another people which has been persecuted like us. And there is no other people that has rehabilitated itself like us. We remain a people with memory, faith and determination. As dusk falls tonight we shall mourn and remember, and in the morning, we will once again go out to work, to build and create”.
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