Readings recall Holocaust’s horror

Sixty years after the Nuremberg trials did what men could do to punish those responsible for the Nazi slaughter of more than 6 million, Jews and gentile friends filled Spokane’s Temple Beth Shalom on Tuesday to remember.

“We cannot learn from the Holocaust if we do not remember,” survivor Eva Lassman told the solemn gathering.

Lassman called Europe “a land of darkness” 61 years ago, noting that 1.5 million Holocaust victims were children.

“They could have become the children of the light, but they were cut down,” she said.

Holocaust survivor Carla Peperzak was overcome by emotion while reading one of six chapters from a relatively new liturgy designed to give Holocaust remembrances some of the consistency of Passover and other sacred services.

Peperzak read the part of a young woman called Gertrude, who represented all the women who had hoped vainly that “the storm would pass.” Gertrude lost her family and was forced into slave labor.

“They burned a blue number into our arms and from that moment on it was only sewing, sewing, sewing for us,” Peperzak read.

Five other readings dealt with other perspectives on the Holocaust.

In one, Jews were forced to walk ahead of German soldiers to clear a mine field; in another a young man said his “heart died within me” when he was forced to remove his slain brother’s gold teeth at a death camp.

As there were six readings, six candles were lighted in memory of the dead and the survivors, the destroyed communities, the murdered children, those who fought back in ghettos and in the armed forces, the righteous people of other nations, and in honor of the state of Israel.

Tuesday’s service remembered the other ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, political enemies and others who were murdered along with Jews in Nazi Germany.

And it remembered that hatred and genocide weren’t stopped by the Allied victory in World War II, nor by the war-crime trials at Nuremberg.

“It continues as we speak,” said keynote speaker George Critchlow, an associate professor of law at Gonzaga University and a founding member of the Gonzaga Institute for Action Against Hate.

One of many examples he cited was the ongoing bloodbath in the Darfur region of Sudan. The United States and other major nations seem unable or unwilling to support international intervention, Critchlow said.

Some of his examples were closer to home, including the April 16 arrest of a man who allegedly assaulted a black woman because of her race just moments before he led police on a 52-mile chase in a stolen Spokane Valley Fire Department medic vehicle.

Critchlow also cited the ongoing dispute over the expulsion of Maj. Margaret Witt from the Air Force Reserve because she is a lesbian.

“We have a responsibility to counter hate whenever and wherever it emerges,” Critchlow said.