Today is April 20, 2009.
Yes, it’s 4/20 and therefore the pot-smoker’s annual holiday. But this year, 4/20 is something bigger. Much bigger.
For the first time that I’m aware of, today marks two opposing, yet intricately related anniversaries.
By the Hebrew calendar, it is the 26th of Nisan. On the 27th of Nisan every year, Jews commemorate the Holocaust with Yom HaShoah (the shortened name for Yom HaZikaron laShoah v’laG’vura, Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and Heroism). Jewish holidays start on the evening before the holiday; therefore, tonight at sunset, the 26th of Nisan, 5769, at 7:50 pm, Yom HaShoah will begin.
Coincidentally or not, on April 20, 1889, exactly 120 years ago today, a man named Adolf Hitler was born. The very same man who is now infamous for spearheading the Holocaust—and who is still revered in neo-Nazi circles as a misunderstood visionary leader.
Those of us who are Jewish will be doing a few things to mark the day. Some will go to or participate in twenty-four hour name-reading events, in which speakers volunteer to stand at a podium from sunset tonight until sunset tomorrow night and rotate speaking into a microphone, reading names off a list of every known person who died in the Holocaust. Some will go to memorial services at synagogues or public gathering grounds. Some will hold silent candlelight vigils. Some will sit at home silently and mourn and remember. I will be lighting a yellow yahrtzeit candle, the candle for mourning which burns for twenty-four hours: yellow for the color of the armband my grandparents and great-grandparents had to wear when they were in Germany at that time, twenty-four hours for the duration of the day from sunset to sunset, two sunsets to symbolize the ending of life which came all too soon to six million Jews and three million other victims of the Nazi death machine, not to mention the brave soldiers who died on the front lines and the innocent civilians who were in the way of the bombs dropped in the effort to defeat the Third Reich.
The irony that I will be lighting a candle for mourning on Hitler’s birthday is not lost on me.
What would have happened if, a hundred and twenty years ago today, Mrs. Hitler’s midwife had ‘slipped,’ and the baby boy was stillborn? The genre of Alternative History has explored this question and its variants to no end; authors such as Turtledove have explored the other end of the spectrum as well, if the Nazis had won the war. These “what if” games may be fun mental exercises, but they don’t change the history. Millions of people died. That’s a fact. Hitler was Chancellor of Germany at the time. That is a fact. Hitler led the effort to exterminate the Jews. That’s a fact. However, anti-Semitism was not his invention; it had been growing in Europe for decades prior to Hitler’s rise to power. That, also, is a fact. Perhaps the Holocaust would have happened with or without him. We’ll never know. There’s one Alternative History tale in which a girl goes back in time, becomes Hitler’s nanny, drowns him in a river when caring for him. She’s proud of herself for saving the world—until time passes, and another man rises to power where the opportunity arose and the exact same events occurred, merely attributed to a different man’s name. There’s no way to know.
What I do know is that anti-Semitism is still alive today. While I will be mourning my mother’s family, skinheads around the world will be celebrating the anniversary of their beloved leader’s birth. While I will be lighting a candle, they will be fueling the fire of hatred around the world. While I will speak a prayer in Hebrew, they will deliver loving eulogies of the man who inspired them and whose memory keeps them going in their effort to cleanse the world of us.
One fact that I like to point out is that Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, doesn’t actually translate literally to “holocaust.” In English, “holocaust” can refer to more than only the occurrences in the late 1930s to early 1940s in Europe. The word has a denotation of burning and destruction, and a connotation of sacrifice or of having a purpose for a greater good; for instance, there can be a holocaust of trees if the trees are being burned down en masse—with a slight connotation that the trees are burning for a reason, whether that be to help fertilize the ground and return minerals to the earth through natural processes or a religious sacrificial ceremony of a culture. The word “shoah” in Hebrew means roughly “the great tragedy.” It doesn’t mean holocaust; it’s not meant to. The Hebrew rejects the sacrificial connotation of the word “holocaust.” Six million Jews died, many of them burned as the literal definition of “holocaust” in English would imply, but it was not a sacrifice. There was no higher purpose to the death and destruction, to the ending of lives in every walk of life from the unborn to the elderly, to the ripping apart of families, to the trauma that those fortunate enough to survive have dealt with every day since liberation. No, instead, the event is “the great tragedy.” Just as we in English name “the Great Depression” and know exactly which depression the speaker is referring to, despite the fact that there have been many economic depressions throughout history, a Hebrew speaker hears shoah and instinctively knows which tragedy is being spoken of.
There was some talk of moving Yom HaShoah to a different day this year. The Hebrew calendar is lunar, and therefore does not align with the solar Gregorian calendar which we use here. Yom HaShoah, and every other Jewish holiday, falls on a different day of the Gregorian calendar every year. Traditionally, Yom HaShoah is always on the 27th of Nisan, but it has sometimes been moved a day or two when it coincides with the Sabbath so that proper commemoration ceremonies can take place in traditional communities who will not light candles or use electronic devices (such as microphones used to read names) once the Sabbath has begun. The concept of mourning our dead while others celebrated the man widely credited with being the cause of their deaths appalled some people—but ultimately, it was decided to let it remain on the same day. We are not ashamed to mourn our dead, no matter what else may be going on in the world.
One hundred and twenty years is the number of years since Hitler was born. It is also the number of years which Moses lived. The traditional blessing one gives to another on someone’s birthday is, “May you live to be a hundred and twenty like Moses.” Let us all be grateful that Hitler did not live to be a hundred and twenty. Let us hope that on Hitler’s 120th birthday, those who idolize him will see that we, those of the Jewish faith, are people, and that we are a people in mourning, and that we will never forget what was done to us, and we will never let it happen again—to us, to others, to anyone. Jews have been one of the most politically active groups in combating the genocides in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Darfur. At 7:50 pm tonight, I will light a candle—I ask you to join me in doing so, wherever you are, if you feel so inclined. I will say a Hebrew prayer, but more importantly, I will say two English words. This is our motto, and tonight, we have double the reason to emphasize:
Never. Again.
