Today is International Holocaust Memorial Day, this year (2025) commemorating 80 years since the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. We remember the millions of people who were needlessly lost in this genocide of unfathomable proportions.
I would like to dedicate today to the memory of Yitzhak Gonen (Gertzenson), a Holocaust survivor, who unlike almost all of his family and the members of the Jewish community of his birthplace, Kaunas, Lithuania, was fortunate to have lived a full life. Yitzhak Gonen passed away in early 2024 at the ripe old age of 93. Only on very rare occasions did he ever talk about his story as the pain of his memories were far too intense for him.
In October 1943, after the Kaunas Ghetto had been transformed into a concentration camp, the Nazi German and Lithuanian collaborator camp officials started a "selektionen" process separating the able-bodied from those considered to be "useless", i.e. children and the frail. When the children and teenagers were gathered to be "selected", the then 14-year-old Yitzhak trusted his instincts and amongst the crowd stood on his tippy-toes so as to make him taller and therefore look older. This move saved him as he was then assigned with the adult males and sent to the Vaivara camp in Estonia as slave labour. Those deemed "children" were rounded up, promptly sent to Auschwitz and murdered.
From what I've learnt, in August 1944, as the Red Army was approaching, many of the inmates at the Vaivara Camp complex were shipped to the Stutthof Camp complex in what is now northern Poland, and those who survived, Yitzhak among them, were soon after liberated.
Later, as a displaced person in the chaos that ensued after the end of WWII, by pure coincidence Yitzhak ran into his mother (we think this was in Prague), who too had fortunately survived the Holocaust. They soon after made Aliyah to Israel, where they started new lives.
There are many out there who would want us to forget the inconvenient truths and dark aspects of the past, but if we forget history, we are doomed to make the same mistakes again, as we have witnessed.
I took the picture below today in 2018. It's in a typical residential area just north of the centre of Minsk, Belarus.
This is 'Yama' (the Pit).
It is the site where on 2 March 1942, Nazi forces shot about 5,000 Jewish residents of the Minsk Ghetto. For me it is one the most moving Holocaust monuments in the world as the constant presence of the human figures, all with individual traits, leading down to their deaths in what is otherwise a nondescript pit, provides a constant and stark reminder to those who live in the area or pass by that a heinous crime against humanity occurred here; that innocent people of all ages died at this spot. History here has not been buried and conveniently forgotten.
May we never forget! May it never be repeated!
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