January 27th is the annual UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day of commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust, in honor of six million Jews, who were brutally murdered by the Nazis.
This year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Embassy of Israel held an online Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony on January 27, 2021 at 10.00AM on the facebook page of the Embassy “Israel in Thailand”.
The ceremony will start with opening remarks by H.E. Dr. Meir Shlomo, the Ambassador of Israel, followed by a message from the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr. António Guterres.
The ceremony also includes the screening of “Whose child are you?”, a documentary testimony of a Holocaust Survivor, Mr. Tswi Herschel, who was born in 1942 to a Jewish-Dutch family in a small town in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. As the family had to move to Amsterdam, as part of deportation of Jews to Ghettos, concentration camps and eventually exterminations camps, Tswi's father contacted non-Jewish Dutch friends and asked for help for his newborn son. A Protestant Dutch family took in baby Tswi, caring for him and raising him as their own child. Tswi’s parents were deported to the extermination camp of Sobibór, where they were murdered shortly after arrival. Tswi's grandmother, his only surviving relative, took him from his foster family after the war. Tswi grew up, got married and had two daughters. In 1986, Tswi and his family immigrated to Israel. Since 1991, Tswi is sharing his personal story with young people and adults around the globe.
The ceremony ends with closing performance by Thai-Italian opera singer, Miss Monique Klongtruadroke. “Shtiler, Shtiler” (hush, hush) is a lullaby composed by 11-year-old Alek Volkoviski with lyrics in Yiddish by Shmerke Kaczerginski. It was one of the best-loved songs of the Vilna ghetto, Lithuania, where the lullaby was first performed in 1943, shortly before the ghetto’s liquidation. The poignant lyrics chronicle the murder of more than 70,000 Jews in Ponar, a forest near Vilna, and lament the pain and suffering of the ghetto inmates.
Holocaust happened more than 70 years ago and is commemorated annually in ceremonies around the globe. However, hatred, intolerance, massacre and horrific incidents are still taking place. The Remembrance ceremony serves as a commitment to do everything to prevent the repetition of such horrific incident in the future. Ambassador Shlomo said: “The real issue which I believe should really worry us all is the lack of knowledge, and dare I say even ignorance, about the Nazi era and the Holocaust in particular. A deficient knowledge of the history of the human race is a perfect breeding ground for racism, discrimination and hate – and maybe the next genocide… As hard and as challenging as it is – the only effective antidote to racism, anti-semitism and other forms of discrimination is education.”
Watch full ceremony here
Read Ambassador Shlomo's Op-Ed: "Holocaust education is a battle worth fighting"