It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day

It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Never forget the Porjamos–the genocide of over a million Romani people by the Nazis.

Never forget the Farhud, a Nazi-inspired pogrom in Iraq, 1941.

Never forget the Nazis also killed Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews.  

Never forget Aktion T4, a the so-called “mercy killings” (genocide) of those called “useless eaters” (disabled people). Never forget that this policy of eugenics was directly inspired by the USA’s eugenics movement and purposefully exported there. 

Never forget that the parents of the first disabled child killed in Aktion T4 wanted their child dead. 

Never forget the hundreds of Black Germans who were forcibly sterilized by the Nazis. 

Never forget the “inverts” and “homosexuals” who were rounded up and sent to their deaths because they were deemed a threat to the “Aryan Race.”

Never forget the “nice Germans” who didn’t “care about politics” and silently watched their neighbors be taken away to be tortured and killed. 

Never forget the Resistance. 

Never forget the anti-fascists and the Partisans who were of many nations, including Jews, who fought the Nazis and rescued concentration camp survivors. 

Never forget the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an armed resistance of Jewish people that saved thousands of lives from the concentration camps. 

Never forget the smaller acts of resistance like industrial sabotage practiced by those in the concentration camps to reduce their contribution to the Nazi war machine. 

Never forget the communists, anarchists, trade-unionists, and other radicals who opposed Nazism and who were incarcerated and killed. 

Never forget the Danish gentiles who saved 90% of its Danish Jewish population of 7,000 while under years of Nazi occupation. 

Never forget that the United States of America’s xenophobic, racist, eugenicist, antisemitic, ableist, and anti-Romani immigration quotas policy condemned millions of people to death. 

Never forget the fate of the M.S. St. Louis. 

Never forget that Nazism was fairly popular in the USA until Germany declared war on it. 

Never forget that antisemitism persisted during that time and was heightened during the McCarthyism. 

Never forget the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) who violently suppressed political radicals (including killing the Jewish communist Rosa Luxemberg and other members of the KPD) during the Wiemar Republic, inadvertently aiding the Nazis. 

Never forget that this and their “lesser of two evils” strategy that led Hitler to become Chancellor. 

Never forget Magnus Hirschfeld, a sexologist, Homosexual Transvestite*, and German Jew–and his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science). *his own terms 

Never forget that the Nazis burned it and all the works in his library. 

Never forget the “Masculunists” (the forerunner of today’s “homonationalists”), their hatred for Magnus Hirschfeld, and their support of the Nazis who later betrayed them in the Night of Long Knives after using them like the tools they were.

Never forget Willem Arondeus, a Dutch Homosexual gentile artist, writer, and resistance leader who led a group in bombing the Amsterdam Public Records Office on July 1st 1943 in order to hinder the Nazi round-up of Jews. 

Never forget his final words: “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.” 

Never forget Chiune Sugihara who saves tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews by disobeying orders and giving them (often false) visas. 

Never forget that the city of Shanghai brought in tens of thousands of Jews, more than any USA city. 

Never forget the USSR, not the USA or Britain, liberated most of the concentration camps and captured Berlin, ending the war. 

Never forget the Japanese-Americans who liberated Dachau that USA textbooks never mention.

Never forget the Kapos.

Never forget that the world knew. 

Never forget all the Holocaust survivors who escaped the concentration camps and arrived in Britain, the USA, and the USSR and told the world their stories. 

Never forget the silence. 

Never forget that the entire chain of command for the USA, including President Roosevelt, ordered the air force not to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz and the gas chambers which would have saved thousands.  

Never forget that it was the Tuskegee Airmen–a racially segregated, all-Black division–that disobeyed orders and bombed the railways to Auschwitz.

Never forget that Hitler’s plans of genocide were inspired by the United States of America’s genocide of its Indigenous Peoples. 

Never forget Henry Ford and all the other American Nazi-collaborators.  

Never forget the pogroms just after the Holocaust officially ended. 

Never forget that never again means never again to anyone. 

Never forget the betrayal. 

Never forget the solidarity. 

Never forget that “first they came for the Socialists.”

Never forget that an injury to one is an injury to all.