Apologies are extended in advance, to regular and irregular (if it persists, please see your doctor) readers alike. To those who pick up this publication weekly (thanks for your patronage), or just from time to time (particularly this time), as well as those here for the first time (welcome to the jungle). To any and all who’ve come looking for a bit of off-beat literary humor, which is this column’s usual port of call.
Sincerest promises that we’ll be back to the same bat-time, same bat-channel next week, but for now… Some things take precedence and must be addressed. Bear with me and we’ll get through this as we always should.
If this paper has adhered to its usual printing schedule and you are reading this on its actual date of publication, April 28th, 2022, then note this is a day of significance. If not and you’re a day or two behind, that’s fine. The significance carries over and can be observed at any time. Time is irrelevant, observation is the important factor.
Today is a holiday of sorts. However it doesn’t fall into or along the same lines as one would consider a traditional “holiday”. It is not cause for celebration, nor reason for mirth or joy. Nor is it a reason to throw a barbeque (considered a horrifically, insensitively insulting event to partake of on this day) or excuse to drink in excess, as so many holidays have become. Some drink to remember, others drink to forget. Sorry but we’ve forgotten enough already, and in this case can’t risk false hopes of remembrance.
Remembrance? Yes, a significant day for remembering. Just a moment set aside to remember a moment in time which should never be forgotten. A day of mourning that should serve as encouragement for prevention of repetition.
Tragically the tragedy of this day’s significance is oft lost to the calendar. Overlooked and dismissed as it pales in comparison to the mindless colorful contributions the likes of “Chocolate Covered Raisins Day” and “International Talk Like a Pirate Day”. May God have mercy upon the idiocracy our race has fallen into.
So how do we honor this day? What can we do to cast a mold of memory?
Be still. Find peace. Light a single candle. Open your heart for compassion and your mind for memory. Perhaps play remnants of the Dachau Song (Dachau LIED) composed at the Dachau Camp in 1938 by Jura Soyfer and Herbert Zipper. An ironic response to the motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes Freedom) inscribed on the gate at the entrance to the camp. Or maybe hum a few bars from The Soldiers of the Moor (Die Moorsoldaten), which was collaboratively written by Johann Esser, Wolfgang Langhoff and Rudi Goguel, during their internment at the Börgermoor Camp, in Western Germany, circa August 1933. It was a favorite marching song of the camp’s 5,000 inmates as well as camp guards who failed to grasp its coded reference. It doesn’t matter if you can’t comprehend the song’s native tongue. The point is to feel rather than hear.
If you can’t sit peacefully still that long, don’t have or can’t afford a candle, don’t have room on your playlist or can’t take a moment out of your precious time to spare, then at the very least, read and remember this…
During the course of WW2, from 1939 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe. The first camps were established in March 1933 immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Prisoners of said camps were subjected to torture, intense manual labor, starvation, freezing conditions and medical experimentation. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. These people were not executed, they were exterminated like vermin.
History is like a merry go round, and you can either focus on the rider that changes or you can focus on the same horse that goes around every single time. We must stay diligent so that something as horrific as the Holocaust cannot happen ever again, never again.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is today, Thursday, April 28 2022. Take a moment to mourn and remember.
I welcome almost all questions and comments via through the Focus, or E-mail me at [email protected]. Hope to hear from ya, until then try and stay focused. See ya.
