By: Mike Kelly
Bryan, Ohio
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is on January 27 and marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp by Soviet troops in 1945.
The United Nations designated this date in 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to officially honor the victims of Nazism and promote Holocaust education worldwide.
The day is dedicated to remembering the six million Jews and millions of others murdered by the Nazis, and to renewing commitment to human freedom and justice.
It serves as a global day to counter antisemitism, racism, and other forms of hatred that can lead to violence against a people group.
Not all Jews or other ethnic groups the Nazi’s wanted rid of were put in the 6 extermination camps designed for assembly-line style mass murder, primarily using poison gas. Others were put into concentration camps like Dachau that held political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma (Gypsies), and others deemed “undesirable” by the Nazis.
While not initially designed for immediate mass extermination like the killing centers, prisoners were subjected to brutal conditions, starvation, disease, and forced labor under a policy of “extermination through labor,” which led to over a million deaths in these camps.
“How could we get there from here?” many must have asked. How could rational thinking people come to believe that other human beings were somehow so sub-human that they were worthy of death? I think that the horror of this entire chapter in history is not that it happened, but that it happens again and continues to happen.
It wasn’t the first time, nor was it even the last time. It’s still going on. We’ve seen Assad (Syria) kill some 50,000, Bashir (Sudan) 300,000, Haile Selassie (Ethiopia) 700,000, Mao Zedong (China) 30,000,000, Putin (Russia) 70,000, Kambanda (Rwanda) 800,000, Saddam Hussein (Iraq), 300,000, Kim Il Sung (N. Korea) 1,600,000. And the list goes on much past the space I have.
Distinctions like ethnicity, social status, and gender are irrelevant in the eyes of God. Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.
We are all “one in Christ”…Does that mean that we can divide God’s creation by Believer and Un-Believer? Can we persecute all who don’t believe God as we did in the Crusades? Of course not.
Acts 17:26 reads “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” We are all one in the respect that we are all created in God’s image.
Peter is recorded in Acts 10:34-35 saying: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and what is right is acceptable to him”. God’s acceptance is not limited to any single group of people.
We need days like this week’s recognition of the Holocaust to remember that every man, woman, and child, regardless of the language they speak or the color of their skin or the god they worship, is worthy of our care and love.
And our defense of the defenseless is not limited to those we look like or believe like, but to every member of the human race. It’s a lesson we need to learn and history is a great teacher.
God forbid that there is enough hate in any of us to repeat what we saw in Germany. “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Prov 4:23
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Mike Kelly is the founding pastor of Bryan’s Grace Community Church (retired) and Board Chairman of Bryan’s Sanctuary Homeless Shelter and Williams County’s Compassion (free) Medical Clinic.