ARTICLE OF GEN. SECRETARY KISE ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023: "EVERY PERSON HAS HIS NAME" - Central Jewish Council of Greece, coordinating body of the Jewish Communities of Greece

Details: Created : January 27, 2023

On January 26, 2023, Yad Vashem, the global Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem, presented at the United Nations headquarters a new exhibition entitled "Book of names of victims of the Holocaust".

This monumental work includes in alphabetical order the names of 4.800.000 Holocaust victims who have been identified and documented to date and are included in Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victim Names. The total length of the Book of Names is eight meters, it is two meters high and one meter wide. A streak of light runs through the interior of the Book of Names, illuminating the memory of the Jewish men and women and children murdered during the Holocaust, for all to remember.

At the end of the Book of Names there are blank pages symbolizing more than a million identities that have yet to be recovered from the nameless murdered, from Jewish communities exterminated and extinguished...

Where possible, entries in the Book of Names also contain the dates of birth, hometowns and circumstances and places of death of the respective victims.

As the President of Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan, said:

“The Book of Names serves as a living memorial to millions of Holocaust victims and provides the public with the opportunity to touch and connect with the identities of the individuals the Nazis tried so hard to erase. The presentation of the Book of Names at United Nations headquarters on the eve of World Holocaust Remembrance Day is extremely important and poignant, especially in light of the alarming growing global trends of Holocaust trivialization and distortion as well as anti-Semitism. We must remember these people, not as faceless and anonymous victims, as the Nazis saw them, but as people with unique life stories as we live today."

The lyrics of a poem written by the Israeli poetess ZELDA (Miškovsky) 1914 – 1984, which praise the value of every human life and become an ode to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

Every man has his name

Every man has his own name

God given.

And, still, given by his father and mother.

Every person has a name

Given to him by his stature

And given the way he smiles

And given, even, by his clothes.

Every person has a name

Given to him by the mountains

And given to him by the walls that stand around him.

Every person has a name

Given to him by the planets

And given to him by the neighbors.

Every person has a name

Given to him by his sins

And given by his lusts.

Every man has his name

Given to him by enemies

And given to him by love.

Every person has a name

Given to him from his feast day

And given to him by his labor.

Every man has his name

Given to him by the seasons of the year

And given to him from his own abyss.

Every person has a name.

Given to him by the sea.

And given to him by his death.

Source of Greek performance: "Jewish poetry", Kostis Moskof, Kastaniotis Publications, Athens 1997.

This important exhibition in New York, like this poem, is a call to remembrance: to remember every child, every woman and every man who perished in the Holocaust, as a person with a name and a future that was denied in the name of bigotry and of intolerance. A prescribed crime, ignored by the League of Nations, carried out in the name of the "Final Solution" of the "Jewish problem" as put forth by Adolf Hitler and adopted by the great majority of the German people. A crime that was carried out with the Nazi abusers and the German extermination machine but also with the tolerance of "spectators", with the tolerance of many governments, many local lords, who then rushed to loot the properties of those who were forcibly displaced and brutally killed in Auschwitz, Bergenau, Majdanek, Bergen Belsen and the other extermination camps.

The Book of Names, like Zelda's poem, is a call to action: to be ever vigilant and never to remain silent when human rights and human dignity are threatened. Exactly the way they stood up to barbarity, the few, the "Righteous Among the Nations", who at the risk of their lives saved their Jewish fellow citizens, their fellow human beings.

The victims of the Holocaust, these people, who were our relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow human beings, we also remember them with the "We remember" campaign and that is why Parliaments and Municipal buildings, in Europe and here in Greece, are lit up... to show that the "light of memory" prevails over the "darkness of oblivion".

SOURCE: www.huffingtonpost.gr, 27.1.2023

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