Today, April 24, 2025, is Yom HaShoah, in English “Holocaust Remembrance Day”. It marks eighty years since the liberation of the Nazi death camps. To start I’d like to tell you about Ruth Cohen.
Ruth Cohen
Ruth is a survivor of Auschwitz. Ruth and her sister Teresa survived, eventually being liberated in May 1945. When Ruth and her sister were imprisoned they were separated from several family members. Their father was sent to a work camp. He survived. Their mother, brother, and several cousins died in the gas chambers. Earlier this year Ruth returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the very site of the building where she was held.
Ruth Cohen – Auschwitz survivor returns to brave a harrowing past
Her words when she was there: “I’m still here”.
An estimated six million Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps. It’s estimated that there are only about 245,000 survivors alive today. In a few years there will be none. It’s up to us, the following generations, the heirs to the memories, to carry on, to remember, to say “Never Again”. Yet we’ve forgotten too much. The list of genocides since then end of World War 2 is too long to recount here. Two million, maybe more dead in the Cambodia massacres. A half million in Rwanda. It’s not clear how many in Bangladesh. The estimates are from 300,000 to three million. The reality is that no one knows the exact numbers. Anywhere. Yet we must remember that they happened.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” – Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Adolph Hitler is reported to have said “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
The Rohingya in Myanmar. The Masalit in Sudan. The Uyghurs in China. And some argue the Palestinians in Gaza (members of the Netanyahu government have called for the area to be ethically cleansed. Trump proposed that the Palestinians be removed to build a resort). All of these genocides are happening now as I write this, as you read this.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Never again is now. We must never forget The Holocaust. “Never again is now” means that we stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters that Hamas and others have committed to eradicating. “Never again is now” means calling out the killing going on around the world today. “Never again is now” means standing against Donald Trump and his war on the brown people in this country, his plans to ethnically cleanse the United States, to make it white “again”.
We can’t say “never again” because genocide continues. The Nazis were stopped, but that’s not enough.
Never again is now.
The Ugliness is the Hope.
Resist. Persist. Oppose. Propose. Be the opposition with a proposition.
We need to be reminded. It’s easy to put the “past” memories to the back of mind because they were long ago and far away, and easy to miscategorize current actions as something other than genocide.
Thank you. We need to be reminded of this.