Countering Holocaust denials, young, old speak out

[Forkboy]

Trudi Goodman of Cambridge touches numbers on a memorial at the annual Holocaust remembrance yesterday in Boston's Faneuil Hall.

With Holocaust denials continuing to roil global politics, area Jewish leaders presented a 14-year-old girl's deeply personal essay on speaking out against injustice and an 81-year rabbi's first-ever recounting of his Holocaust survival story yesterday to illustrate the power of remembering.

"Our work is not done until the day when true moral clarity is restored," said Rabbi Jonina Pritzker, Holocaust Commemoration Committee chairwoman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston. "When Jews were gassed, burned, cremated, hung, and exterminated during the Holocaust, that represented both the evil of the perpetrators and the failure of those that allowed it to happen. We have seen that when good people fail to stand up together and speak up, then the evil-doers prevail."
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One of the stories came yesterday from Rabbi Marc Samuels, a retired professor of Jewish theology, who said he had declined to publicly relive the horrors he witnessed while living in Poland in the early 1940s - even refusing to teach courses on the Holocaust - because it was too painful. But he said he decided to share with the audience yesterday memories of public hangings in Warsaw and being told by German sol diers he would be shot if he cried over it, because he believes people are beginning to forget the Holocaust.

"I could not say, anymore, 'no,' " he said. "It's too late for me to say no."

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/04/27/countering_holocaust_denials_young_old_speak_out/