The other night, a friend of mine who is a Christian scholar and I were talking about the Holocaust.
I explained about the memory books that are usually kept under the TOWN or GHETTO name. They are called YIKOR BOOKS...and there has been an ongoing project.
In war, soldiers fight soldiers. In the Holocaust that occurred in World War II, millions of people who were not soldiers - citizens - innocents - were murdered in ways that testify to the INHUMANITY of HUMAN BEINGS - a human capability to commit horror. Today we think that many of these people were insane. I have been challenged to wonder whether or not we all have souls as a condition of being. Perhaps we can loose them.
It is true that the victims of the Holocaust were not all Jewish, but the YIZKOR books are a Jewish project. These memory books are useful to genealogists and family history researchers and historians... and I think anyone who is interested in trying to comprehend the history of Europe ought to do some reading on the subject and take a look at these books.
PERHAPS IT IS BEST TO UNDERSTAND THESE BOOKS THIS WAY:
Testimonials of a life - and a death - give at last a person the RESPECT THAT THEY DESERVE AS A HUMAN BEING. Those who remember them testify to their existence.
"YAD VASHEM, together with its partners, has collected and recorded here the names and biographical details of half of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices. Millions more still remain unidentified: It is our collective duty to persist until all their names are recovered. Do you know of a Holocaust Victim? Submit Pages of Testimony and send photographs of the victims so they will always be remembered."
