By
Edith Shaked
,
Special to JTNews
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), should amend the “Proclamation of the Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust,” as annually posted at its website, to truthfully commemorate all the different victims.
A reading of the first paragraph seems exclusive. Here it is: “Whereas, the Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945 — six million were murdered; Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons; and millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny;”
It seems that the USHMM does not consider the Roma, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, and the Jews persecuted and killed outside continental Europe as Holocaust victims; and that for the museum, the Holocaust was the attempt to annihilate only “European Jewry.” Indeed, the USHMM glossary defines the Holocaust as “persecution and annihilation of European Jewry.” But SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler categorically proclaimed, “Every Jew that we can lay our hands on is to be destroyed…without exception…. Obliterate the biological basis of Jewry.”
The historical record clearly shows that the Nazi regime indeed attempted to annihilate all the Jews in the world, and de facto persecuted and murdered Jews in pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa, Italian Libya and Iraq.
The historical evidence is also unambiguous. As per the racist and totalitarian ideology driving the Holocaust, only the tall, blond, blue-eyed, healthy, heterosexual “Aryan,” and Nazi supporter had the right to live. Thus, the Holocaust was Hitler’s war against all the Jews — and against many other groups of people. The victims were all persecuted by the same perpetrators, and shared the same fate for the same ideological reason. At Auschwitz, the ashes of the “Gypsies” and others mingled with the ashes of the white Jews from continental Europe, and with the ashes of the brown Jews from pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa and from Italian Libya, who were also part of the Jewish people that the Nazi regime sought to annihilate.
But the USHMM proclamation will not, for example, commemorate Gilbert Mazouz, shot in North Africa on his way to a Nazi slave labor camp while following orders from SS Walter Rauff, who responsible for gassing Jews in Eastern Europe. The Nazi regime didn’t discriminate.
Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel appropriately stated, that “not all the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims,” when he asked President Jimmy Carter’s support for a national Holocaust museum.
Truth and accuracy are vital when informing about this tragedy. Thousands of people and officials will be commemorating the Days of Remembrance this month. Consequently, the USHMM should rewrite the first paragraph of its proclamation, as per the true logic of Nazism, the Nazi, totalitarian, racist, and anti-Semitic ideology.
In the Holocaust, the Nazi regime attempted to eliminate the Jewish people, ultimately killing 6 million Jews, and persecuted and murdered millions more by the end of 1945.
Edith Shaked is the daughter and granddaughter of Tunisian Holocaust survivors and is a board member of H-Holocaust, the international organization of Holocaust scholars. She is a Holocaust educator and researcher in Tucson, Ariz.