Our dear honored Survivors,
My brothers and sisters in the Jewish Community,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
1944. On the edge.
This year, Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day highlights the unique situation of our people in 1944 – exactly 70 years ago. The expression "on the edge" is taken from Nathan Alterman's poem, Joy of the Poor, which expresses the feeling which prevailed that year among the Jews of Europe, who were in a double race on which their very lives depended. On the one hand, cities from east to west, such as Vilna and Minsk, Warsaw and Riga, Belgrade and Paris, were being liberated from Nazi Germany; the Red Army was advancing, and the western Allies continued to bombard Germany, landing in Normandy seemed to be tipping the scales. It seemed like the possibility of survival was nearing. On the other hand, in the same year, our brothers and sisters in Hungary were sent to Auschwitz, the Lodz and Kovno ghettos were liquidated, the last of their inmates deported and murdered, and death marches were initiated from the liberated territories to the heart of what remained of the "Third Reich." Astoundingly, with the Nazis about to be defeated, the killing machine continued on.
It was a year in which everything depended on the scales of time, and the Jews remaining in Europe were asking themselves: will the Red Army from the east and the Allies from the west arrive before the Nazis murder whoever is still alive?
In March 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary and immediately commenced preparations for the swiftest and most organized deportation any Jewish community has ever witnessed: From the middle of May, over 430,000 Jews from Hungary were sent almost exclusively to Auschwitz, where the vast majority was murdered in the space of only two months. A ray of light appeared with the beginning of the return of the remnant of those exiled to Transnistria, a region in southern Ukraine where conditions were among the most horrific. At around the same time, Zionist youth, other Jewish activists and diplomats stepped up rescue activities in Budapest, eventually contributing to the survival of over 100,000 Hungarian Jews. However, in June, Jews from the Greek island of Corfu were rounded up and deported, and in July, the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania was liquidated – so many families in South Africa lost family from there.
On the edge.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Nazi ideology, centered around a burning desire to kill every single Jewish individual, dictated such efforts even in the final year of the war, even when the Germans seemingly needed every means at their disposal to fight at the front. Thus, they ignored the urgent requirement for trains to bring equipment and arms, and for every pair of hands that could still work to produce weapons that might have turned the tide of the war in their favor.
In June 1944, the true story became clear to the world. The "Auschwitz Protocols", a detailed account, written by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, young Jews who somehow escaped from the concentration and death camp, exposed for the first time the central role of Auschwitz in the extermination system.
In October, an uprising in Auschwitz was staged by the Sonderkommando, a group of Jewish prisoners tasked with the unspeakable job of handling the bodies of the murdered victims. They blew up one of the gas chambers with explosives smuggled in to them by a group of young Jewish women. The question we must ask ourselves is, from where did these men and women, imprisoned in this indescribable place, draw the strength to organize, band together, choose the right moment, and actually hope to succeed?
The Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the phrase "genocide" in 1944, and participated in the drafting of the UN convention for its prevention. But it has not ended. This month we mark the 20th anniversary of the violence in Rwanda and today here in Africa and in my neighborhood, in Syria, we have not succeeded in achieving “never again”. Lots of people around our world remain today “on the edge”.
For us, our people correctly remember and teach our children about the Shoah and about 1944, that moment between annihilation and liberation, a tension that was literally a question of life and death for our people, who were living on the very edge. Amazingly, all of this happened just four short years before the founding of the State of Israel. Only four years? In 1944, survival was measured in minutes and days and looking ahead four years and to the safety of our State that we all take for granted, and which is the center of thought and security for all Jews, remained a fantasy, an eternity away, as our brothers and sisters looked to survive day by day… on the edge.