vaznetti | Commemoration (Reply)

Today is Yom haShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), and one of the things the AJC does to commemorate it is a reading of names -- I'm sure there's a technical term for this, but can't think what it is -- so I was out in the cold and wind to read for them this afternoon. It was just a fifteen minute slot, but I got the list with the children on it, so it was fifteen minutes of "Name, from Place, killed at Place in Year, age X," with the ages ranging from 1 to 17. Whole families, and a lot of them at places like Auschwitz and Treblinka -- and imagine keeping a child of one or two alive the whole way on the train, only to have him or her killed on arrival -- but also, all the deaths in 1941 when the German army was moving through the Soviet Union, killing as they went.

Halfway through it started to rain, but as the organizer pointed out, they were killed no matter the weather, so we read their names come rain or shine. Or, apparently, hail.