By Michael Bart
SAN DIEGO (Press Release)–San Diego’s Community Holocaust Commemoration will take place this year on Yom HaShoah, April 11th, at 1:30 pm at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, David and Dorothea Garfield Theater. The theme for this year’s program is “Remember, Honor, and Teach: Liberation 65 Years Later.” Each year San Diegans gather to remember the victims of the Holocaust, honor the survivors, and teach future generations.
Our guest speaker will be Stephen Smith, Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. His talk on “Liberation 65 Years Later,” will be followed by a short film containing interviews with three local survivors and U.S. military camp liberators. The film was developed especially for this program and utilizes footage from the Shoah Foundation as well as footage from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The program will recognize and honor World War II veterans, with a military color guard and as part of the candle lighting ceremony. San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders will be attending and making a few remarks.
Liberation 1945
As Allied troops moved across Europe in the fight against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany and most were suffering from starvation and disease.
Soviet forces were the first to encounter a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin in July 1944. The Germans had attempted to hide the evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp, but in their haste to evacuate the camp, they had left the gas chambers standing. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The Germans had already dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of the Jews of Poland had been killed.
In January 1945 the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the Nazis’ largest mass murder and concentration camp. There they found several thousand emaciated prisoners barely alive. The Nazis had forced the majority of the prisoners westward on a death march. The Soviets later liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbruck concentration camps.
U.S. forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, on April 11, 1945. They also liberated Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenburg, Dachau, and Mauthausen camps.
British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition, were found alive. Thousands, diseased and starved, died after having been liberated.
Liberators found unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps. Only after liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. Liberators often remained scarred by the enormity of the evil they encountered. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery.
Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Foundation
Inspired by his experience making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. Within several years, the Foundation’s Visual History Archive grew to nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages, representing 56 countries; it is the largest archive of its kind in the world.
In January 2006, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation became part of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where the testimonies in the Visual History Archive will be preserved in perpetuity. The change of name to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education reflects the broadened mission of the Institute: to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies. Today the Institute reaches educators, students, researchers, and scholars on every continent, and supports efforts to collect testimony from the survivors and witnesses of other genocides.
Our guest speaker, Stephen D. Smith, is Executive Director of the Shoah Foundation. Stephen founded the UK Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, England and is an international speaker, lecturing widely on issues relating to the history and collective response to the Holocaust, genocide, and crimes against humanity. In recognition of his work, Stephen received the Interfaith Gold Medallion, the Andrew Cross Award for religious broadcasting, an Honorary Doctorate of Law from Leicester University, and became a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
Stephen is committed to making the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust and of other crimes against humanity a compelling voice for education and action. His leadership at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute focuses on finding strategies to optimize the effectiveness of the testimonies for education, research, and advocacy purposes.
San Diego Community Holocaust Commemoration
For the past thirty five years San Diegans have commemorated Yom HaShoah with a community event, which has grown to become one of the largest Holocaust Commemoration program in the United States. Last year more than 600 people packed the theatre at the JCC, and the overflow watched the program on a big screen in the JCC library. The event is covered by both print and broadcast media and attended by politicians and dignitaries.
Event sponsors are: The Jewish Community Relations Council of the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County, the New Life Club, the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center Jacobs Family Campus, the Agency for Jewish Education, Jewish Family Service, Jewish Community Foundation, and the San Diego Rabbinical Association.
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Michael Bart is the son of Holocaust survivors and has chaired the Community Holocaust Commemoration in San Diego for the past five years.