POSSIBLE TERMS TO DESCRIBE THE UNTHINKABLE

Holocaust –from the ancient Greek for a “burnt offering,” used metaphorically by English writers since Milton to describe hideous destruction by fire

Shoah –Hebrew for “catastrophe”, the term preferred by Israeli scholars

Genocide –a term coined by the Polish-born expert on international law, Rafael Lemkin, to describe the attempt to murder an entire people, outlawed by international treaty in 1948

Most Germans today speak of “the mass murder of the Jewish people during the Second World War”

The British military governor of Jerusalem, Borton Pasha, on December 11, 1917

THE BALFOUR DECLARATION(from a letter of November 2, 1917, by Foreign

Secretary Balfour to Lord Rothschild and the Zionist Federation)

“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”This language was incorporated into the formal League of Nations mandate for Palestine in 1922

Trilingual documents of “Palestine, E.I. [Eretz Israel]”

“Palestine: Promised Land, Land Regained:

The Most Extraordinary Effort

of our Time”(Zionist recruitment

film, 1935)

THERE WERE ABOUT TWO MILLION PEOPLEALTOGETHER IN INTERWAR PALESTINE

DATEJewish

Population

1921 69,000

1926 150,000

1931 172,000

1936 384,000

1939 425,000

Jewish immigration accelerated to 60,000 per year after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933

The Western Wall, beneath the Dome of the Rock

Orthodox rabbis provoked bloody riots in August 1929 by placing a screen here

Amin el-Husseini, “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem,and the Arab Committee in 1936

Scottish troops hunt Arab rebels, 1936/37;thousands of Palestinian militants were killed.

THE PUBLIC RECORD OF THEJEWISH REFUGEE CRISIS

300,000 of 500,000 German Jews flee persecution from 1933 until September 1939. 1937: Britain responds to Arab uprising in Palestine by restricting Jewish immigration to 15,000 per year. July 1938: At the Evian Conference delegates from 32 countries refuse to help Jewish refugees. April-December 1940: The German occupiers confine 3 million Polish Jews to ghettoes.1942: Berlin orders that all Jews under German rule be “evacuated” to “labor camps” in Eastern Europe.

Burning Synagogues in Siegen and Bielefeld

on Reichskristallnacht, November 9/10, 1938

Jews arrested during Reichskristallnacht aremustered in Buchenwald, November 1938. The SS now

took charge of pressuring all Jews to flee Germany.

Entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, where 500,000 Jews were crammed into a district built for 50,000

Crowded street in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1941/42:Jobs were scarce and food rations, grossly inadequate

Administering racial

discrimination: A German food ration card from February

1940 and the Yellow Star

The Secret History of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”

Preparations for the invasion of the USSR call for the “annihilation of the Jewish-Bolshevik system” and execution of all “commissars”.The top Nazi leaders agree in secret, probably in July 1941, that the policy of expulsion must be replaced by mass murder.Mass shootings of Jewish men, women, and children in occupied Soviet territory begin in August/September 1941.Genocide became the policy of the German government at the secret Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

Soviet POW’s fill in the ravine where the SS shot 33,000 Jews from Kiev at Babi Yar on September

29/30, 1941

Site of the Wannsee Conference, convened on January 20, 1942, by

the Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich and SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann.Bureaucrats learn that “it is the Führer’s wish” that all Jews be “evacuated” and that most are

expected to perish….

German Jews deported from Würzburg, spring 1942

Nazi propaganda in 1942 blamed the Jews for the

war

“The Jewish Conspiracy”

“THE JEW:Warmonger

War-Prolonger”

Map of the operations associated with the Holocaust, 1942/43

Auschwitz-Birkenau, February 1945

Auschwitz when Elie Wiesel arrived

THE RAILWAY ENTRANCE TO AUSCHWITZ

Elie Wiesel in 1943(at age 15),

the year before his deportation to

Auschwitz.His family in Sighet

came under Hungarian rule in 1940.

Hungary had grown through alliance with Hitler.Sighet was just northeast of Baia Mare

Admiral Miklos Horthy,Regent of Hungary,

1919-1944:He bowed to German

pressure to deport 100,000 “alien” Jews (such as Moishe the

Beadle) but refused to deport the 800,000 Hungarian Jewish

citizens. Germany occupied

Hungary in March 1944, and mass deportations to Auschwitz began in

May.

Hungarian Jews newly arrived at Auschwitz, May-June 1944

Hungarian Jews undergo selection on the Auschwitz train ramp

Hand-carved model of the main gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau

(U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Details

Geographic distribution of the six

million Jewish victims

Elie Wiesel, liberated in Buchenwald, 16 April 1945

Elie Wiesel on the Day of Remembrance in the U.S. Capitol with President Carter & Senator Robert Byrd, 1978

WIESEL ATTENDED NETANYAHU’S SPEECH TO CONGRESS ON MARCH 3 AS A GUEST OF JOHN

BOEHNER

"And I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But I can guarantee you this, the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over."

Netanyahu: "Elie, your life and work inspires us to give meaning to the words, 'never again.'