Holocaust Memorial Day
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. It is 65 years since 27 January 1945, the day the Soviet army liberated the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a teenager I first learned about that place and others like it after reading the Diary of Ann Frank. Later I learned much more. The horror really came home to me in 2006 when I went to Poland and visited the museum site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It wasn't the railway track, the huts, the vast area covered by these 2 camps, or being led with other tourists into a gas chamber, that got me. It was a small glass museum case containing beautiful hand-stitched baby garments. Some mother or grandmother had lovingly prepared these for a child who never lived to grow out of them and who probably never wore them. So much hope for the baby's future must have gone into those stitches. For what? So a mother and grandmother like me can weep over them decades later? And remember that genocide around the world did