A Day of Remembrance
April 16, 2015
Today’s date correlates to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar and marks the start of the Jewish uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw, Poland, during World War II (1939-1945). In many parts of the world, this day is now observed as Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Holocaust was a program of state-sponsored murder by the government of Nazi Germany. By the end of the Holocaust, about 6 million Jewish men, women, and children—more than two-thirds of the Jews in Europe—had been murdered. Millions of others perceived as “undesirable” by the Nazi government, including people with disabilities, the Roma, and people of certain religions other than Judaism, were also killed in the Holocaust.
Dazed and starving prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp at Ebensee, Austria, soon after American troops from the 80th Infantry Division liberated the camp. Credit: NARA
Beginning in the autumn of 1940, Nazi Germany began holding the Jews of Warsaw—the largest Jewish community in Europe—in one small area of the city. This area came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghetto was small, only 1.3 square miles (3.4 square kilometers). It was surrounded by a wall that was patrolled by armed guards. Some 400,000 Jews lived in this small space. Food and medicine was always in short supply in the ghetto, and with the cramped conditions, many people died. In 1942, the Germans began systematically removing Jews from the ghetto and sending them to the concentration camps, where most of them died. By early 1943, only some 70,000 Jews remained in Warsaw. In April 1943, although poorly armed, the Jews began fighting back against the Germans. Some 7,000 Jews died in the fighting. It took the Nazis about 4 weeks to completely regain control in the Warsaw ghetto. The thousands of Jews remaining there were then either summarily shot or put onto trains for the camps.
Many events commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the United States, from April 13 to 17, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., holds an event in its Hall of Remembrance wherein people continuously read the names of those killed in the Holocaust. A ceremony held in the Rotunda of the Capitol features holocaust survivors, liberators, and political leaders. In Israel, the nation comes to a standstill for two minutes of silence as air-raid sirens blare. In other nations, people light candles in cemeteries or attend religious services.
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