Lest we forget

Friday, 27 January 2017



In 2000, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) launched the research project to create a comprehensive source that would accurately document the thousands of persecution sites established by the Nazis.   The source is named Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945.  So far, the first two volumes have been published and the remaining five volumes are set for completion in 2025.

Originally, the USHMM estimated that the research team would uncover about 5000 sites that would include forced labour camps, military brothels, ghettos, POW camps and concentration camps.

In 2013, New York Times’ article on the project, reported that, the researchers so far had located 30,000 slave labour camps; 1150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1000 prisoner-of war camps; 500 military brothels employing sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and the infirm, performing forced abortions; ‘Germanising’ prisoners, or transporting victims to killing centres”.

By 2017, the researchers determined that when all seven volumes are published the Encyclopedia will contain more than 42,500 sites. Cf. Noah Lederman, "Researchers uncover vast numbers of unknown Nazi killing fields”, www.timesofisrael.com.

This total will not include the sites where the people of the countries under Nazi occupation killed, on their own account, their Jewish neighbours and citizens during the war, and some upon their return from concentration camps.

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On this 72nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Those who deny the Holocaust remain strangers to humanity.

Those who remember it,

Honour the memory of its victims,

Care for its survivors,

Continue the good fight with and for the Jewish people.

Those who also remember,

The genocidal killings of  innocents,

The gypsies, the elderly, the physically disabled, 

The mentally infirm and foetuses

Honour their memory,

Continue the good fight with everyone for the sake of humanity.