WLRN
Holocaust Survivor Peter Tarjan donated about 45 letters and postcards to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. They are his family s last correspondences to each other, before many of them were killed. Tarjan was eight years old when the war came to Budapest, Hungary. He lost both of his parents to death marches to concentration camps. The letters are the only connection he has left to his family.
Jan. 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Volunteers are helping the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum host a February What You Do Matters event to connect survivors to people in a virtual way during the pandemic.
Through powerful first-person accounts, scholarly analyses and historical data,
Century of Genocide takes on the task of explaining how and why genocides have been perpetrated throughout the course of the twentieth century. The book assembles a group of international scholars to discuss the causes, results, and ramifications of these genocides: from the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; to the Jews, Romani, and the mentally and physically handicapped during the Holocaust; and genocides in East Timor, Bangladesh, and Cambodia.
The second edition has been fully updated and features new chapters on the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and the mass killing of the Kurds in Iraq, as well as a chapter on the question of whether or not the situation in Kosovo constituted genocide. It concludes with an essay concerning methods of intervention and prevention of future genocide.
Charles Ticho
“Who is Dr. Ryshavy and why would he make me the heir of his house in the Czech Republic?”
The was the question that the man sitting across from me one day asked me. I opened my mouth to answer, but I stopped. I knew the answer. In fact, I’ve known the answer for nearly 70 years. But I asked myself, am I the person tell it? Should I be the one to reveal to the questioner a decades-long secret a secret that was well known in our big family but apparently had been kept from him for all these years?
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Jan. 28, 2021
At first glance, the three-minute video featuring Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day seems indistinguishable from the many messages of commemoration and solidarity offered by world leaders.
Erdogan describes how the racism and hate crimes that led to the genocides of the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda and Cambodia are still thriving today; he mentions the UN Genocide Convention; he ends with the hope for a future without discrimination and crimes against humanity.
But on further examination, it’s clear Erdogan’s words were far less anodyne, and far more cynical. Erdogan commemorated the Holocaust in order to instrumentalize its usefulness to his own stark political agenda. Rather than engaging with the Holocaust