Israeli Military Remembers

From the BBC:

"Return to Auschwitz: How Israel keeps Holocaust memories alive"

The number of people who survived the Holocaust is dwindling - they are all now old men and women. But the Holocaust carries a special importance for Israel. Can it ensure that the next generation knows, and does not forget, what happened in Europe seven decades ago? Under a lightless Polish sky as dull and flat as a sheet of beaten lead the Israeli flag flutters listlessly in the light wind. There are not many touches of colour to be seen at the gates of Auschwitz and the blue Star of David stands out on its crisp white background. The Israeli soldiers carrying the flag have not come as tourists of course - they are here as an official military delegation to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and to piece together fragments of family histories that were shattered by war and by genocide. To the foreign tourists they are something of an attraction. German, Polish and Japanese visitors film the scene on their mobile phones as the Israelis parade alongside the railway tracks on which the Nazis brought more than a million Jews to their deaths. There are moments when the Israelis look like tourists themselves with their cameras and their tour guides - but their government sends them here with a purpose. It believes that deepening their knowledge of the Holocaust will deepen their commitment to defending the country. Behind them is the grimly familiar brick building with a high archway under which the trains slowed to a halt as they reached the end of the line. The Israeli delegation is marching in the footsteps of the many Jews who took their last steps here.  This is the spot where German SS officers rapidly assessed which prisoners looked fit and strong enough to be sent to the wooden blockhouses where the slave labourers lived. The Germans had taken a timber building originally designed to house about 50 cavalry horses and adapted it to the demands of the prison camp. Four hundred prisoners were crammed into the same space, packed on to double-decker bunks. In freezing rooms on starvation rations only a few lived for more than a few months.

The rest were herded towards the gas chambers. It was murder on an industrial scale - whole communities perished together within hours of climbing down from the trains. So the most moving moment in the Israeli soldiers' journey comes inside one of the old blockhouses, where a handful of them read out loud lists of the names of family members who died in the Holocaust. Sometimes almost nothing is known to tell the stories of lives that were not lived, except a name.  As Yishai Szekely - a doctor who serves as a reserve officer in an artillery unit - explains, in some families first-hand memories are passed down. There are photographs or books and ornaments with stories attached, that make the dead seem real. Here, the reading of the names is the only way to reclaim the dead from the anonymity of genocide.  "Six million is such a huge number, even to think of 1,000 it confuses you," Szekely says. "The power is in the name because we don't have much left. That's the only thing we can touch or understand or imagine, our only connection that we could start to make to our past… When you connect to one name, one person to one name, it makes it easier for you to understand."

^ It is fitting that every member of every military in the world remember what happens when soldiers simply follow orders (like the Nazis claim.) It is especially important for Israelis to remember as it is their history and why there country was allowed to be created in 1948. The number killed in the Holocaust is well over 6 million and for most that is too hard to grasp so by humanizing the victims and the survivors helps us to get a glimpse of what happened. ^

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22892783