Since the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 EC until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 the Jewish history is an endless chain of tragedies and disasters. The worst of all was the Shoa, the systematic murder of more than six million Jewish man, women and children between 1939-45 by the German Nazis and their collaborators in occupied Europe.
On September 1st 1939 the Jewish people was a European one. Many cities in Europe were inhabited by big and vibrant Jewish communities, some of them founded 2000 years ago. The USSR inhabited moiré than 5 million Jews. 11 percent of the whole population of Poland was Jewish. 3.5 million Jews lived till the Holocaust in endless Polish cities and shtetls, little Jewish towns. More than than 1/3 of the population of Warsaw, Lodge and Krakow was Jewish. The port of Thessaloniki did not work on Saturdays because half of port workers were Jewish. From Paris and Amsterdam on the West, Copenhagen in North and Ural mountains in the East the Yiddish could have been heard everywhere. All that magnificent old world was destroyed in one of the most brutal and diabolic genocides in human history if not worse of all.
In less than 5 years Jews were physically murdered in all possible methods of death, in Birkenau and Treblinka by gas chambers, starvation, diseases, medical experiments or by shooting squads along ditches where whole families were shot into mass graves. Only in 3 days in autumn 1941 33.000 Jewish men, women and children were shot to death in one forest outside Kiev.
The death did not skip Yugoslavia. Out of 82.000 Jews of the country in 1939 around 67.000 were murdered by the German occupiers, Croatian Ustasha and Hungarian fascists’ gendarmerie. Around 7.000 Jews, mostly women and children, were brought to Staro Sajmiste and taken daily in closed trucks, traveling through the city to Jajince and suffocated by gas. Serbia was the first to be declared Judenfrei by the Nazis.
In 1942, Jews could have escaped by converting to Christianity. In 1942 the death was encoded in the Jewish genetics. For a Jew, man, woman or a baby, there was no escape from death. All Jews were sentenced to collective and individual death by the racial laws of the German Reich. Even those whose grandfathers converted were still ordered to be sent to the gas chambers or to the killing fields to be shot.
This was the Holocaust, a horrible, unimaginable daily sequence of murders, atrocities and cruelty against innocent people who had no army to defend them and no country to hide them in.
We Israeli live always under the troubling feeling that if Israel had been established 10 years earlier, not in 1948 but in 1938, maybe some of the 6 million would have been alive. The memory of the Holocaust is the moral fundament for the establishment, the strength and determination of the Jewish state. Never again, we swear, when we remember our sisters and brothers who were so brutally murdered only because they were born Jewish.