HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY: The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.
The Eldred World War II Museum is hosting a program featuring the son of a Holocaust survivor at 1 p.m. today via Zoom.
Second generation survivor, Menachem Etkin, will be giving a presentation from his home in Israel about his father’s experiences during the Holocaust.
Visit www.eldredpawwiimuseum.com/zoom to see if there are still spots available for the presentation via Zoom.
Menachem’s father, Michael Etkin, was born on Dec. 25, 1932 in Krulevshchizna, North of Belarus. Etkin became a partisan with the Rokosovsky Partisan Brigade and was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
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HOLOCAUST FACTS: While a majority of the killings occurred from 1941-1945, Jews were persecuted by the Nazi regime starting in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.
Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) occurred on the night of November 9, 1938. Nazis pillaged, burned synagogues, broke windows of Jewish-owned businesses, and attacked Jewish people in Austria and Germany.
30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Following Germany’s invasion of Poland, Jews were forced to live in confined areas called ghettos, sometimes sealed off from the rest of the city by fences or barbed wire.
There they faced shortages of food and medicine and the constant fear of being deported to concentration camps.
The Nazis constructed over 44,000 incarceration sites, which included detention centers, forced-labor camps, and killing centers. They functioned independent of any judicial review, and torture, starvation, and mass murder were frequent.
