Holocaust(Commemorative Speech)

Viacheslav LiUniversity of Hawaii at Manoa

Speech 251Spring 2012

Event that we can't get out of our mind"The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-

sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a

word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial

community." [1]

Discrimination starts with "labelling" people

In numbers..

1,500,000 Children 6,000,000 Jews

11-17 million victims(including other groups)

In places.. (In time.. 1933-1945)

In words..

''I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.'' -Hans Frank, Nazi governor of Poland.

In pictures..

I can't see them without crying

In pictures..

http://www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/photo/wlc/image/06/06546.jpg

In museums..

Should we remember?

How did it change me?

Why should I care?

Importance of every single life.

"Never Again".Looking at the world nowadays (Human Rights violations).

Live everyday appropriate. We are all connected.

No discriminations (anti-Semitism, Racism, Nationalism, ethnicity/gender/income/religion/possessions-discriminations)

Holocaust. Discriminations. (My relatives)

My great-great-grand parents (Kogan's) were burned alive inside the synagogue, Krasnaya Gora close to Bryansk (“cherta osedlosti”), together with all Jews (mainly the elderly) who could not evacuate because of their age mainly and sudden Nazi invasion.P.S. (Beyond the Holocaust) Before/after the WWII there were discriminations against Jews in the USSR. Brother of my grandmother, Michael Ryvkin (School Math teacher) was arrested twice in 1929 (as a “trotskist”, after his article in the newspaper “Pravda”) and in 1949 (“enemy of the nation”, Stalin's repressions after “doctors' plot”, 5 years in jail).

Shalom!

"Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he

saved an entire world."

- Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 37a