A survivor of the notorious Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Marion Blumenthal
will speak at the 44th annual Quad Cities Holocaust Remembrance on April 27
Quad Cities-The 44th Annual Quad Cities Holocaust Remembrance, known as Yom HaShoah, will be held Sunday, April 27, at 7 p.m. at Wallenberg Hall, located in Augustana College’s Denkmann Building, 3520 7th Avenue in Rock Island. The speaker for this year’s community-wide commemoration will be Marion Blumenthal, Holocaust survivor and author of the book Four Perfect Pebbles, which tells the story of her family’s persecution by Nazi Germany and its allies.
Following Hitler’s rise to power, the Blumenthal family – father, mother, Marion, and her brother, Albert – were trapped in Nazi Germany. They managed eventually to get to Holland only shortly before it was occupied by the Nazis. For the next six and a half years, the Blumenthals were forced to live in refugee, transit, and prison camps. These included the Westerbork transit camp in Holland, from which Anne Frank was sent to her death at Auschwitz, and the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Alhough they all somehow survived the camps, Walter Blumenthal, Marion’s father, succumbed to typhus just after the camp’s liberation on April 15, 1945.
It took three more years of struggle and waiting before Marion, Albert, and their mother at last obtained the necessary papers and boarded ship for the United States. Their story is one of horror and hardship, but it is also a story of courage, hope, and the will to survive. Today Marion Blumenthal Lazan lives in New York with her husband Nathaniel. They have three married children, nine grandchildren and two great-granddaughters. She will address this year’s remembrance remotely.
Yom HaShoah, translated, means “Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust.” For more than four decades, this has been marked in the Quad Cities by a service of mourning and hope which unites persons of all faiths in remembrance of the great human tragedy of the Holocaust. As part of the annual observance, memorial candles are lit for the six million Jews – and millions of others – who were murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II.
The Yom HaShoah Committee is comprised of community leaders and representatives from the Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities, Augustana College and St. Ambrose University. They invite you to join them at 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 27, for the 44th annual Quad Cities Yom HaShoah observance. In addition to the live event at Wallenberg Hall, it can be streamed using a link you’ll find at jfqc.org.
All people of faith are encouraged to attend.
General Background
As an aid for reporters covering Yom HaShoah, the following background information was compiled from a variety of sources, including Every Person’s Guide to Judaism by Stephen J. Einstein and Lydia Kukoff, 1989, UAHC Press, New York.
About the Holocaust:
Prior to World War II, approximately 8.7 million Jews lived in Europe. By war’s end, some six million of them had been systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies.
A crime of such horrendous proportions could not have been perpetrated in a vacuum. Centuries of anti-Jewish teachings – either promulgated or countenanced by churches and states – created fertile ground for the seed of Nazi hatred to flourish. The people of Europe had been conditioned to despise Jews and see them as something less than human. Thus, they could rationalize the elimination of the Jews not as murder, but as the removal of an unwelcome element of their society.
Millions of people from many ethnic backgrounds were killed in Nazi extermination camps, but Adolf Hitler ordered ferocious intensity be brought to bear in reaching his goal of destroying the Jewish people. In his terminology, it was the “final solution to the Jewish problem.” The murder of six million Jews, including one and a half million children, has indelibly etched the names of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Treblinka and many more camps into the memories of the generation that witnessed the Holocaust and those who have learned of it since.
About Yom HaShoah:
Yom HaShoah, or “Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust,” occurs every year in communities around the world. While it is primarily observed by Jews, it is by no means an exclusive commemoration – as witnessed by the community-wide event held here in the Quad Cities.
In the Quad Cities as elsewhere, we remember the Holocaust not simply because it is a Jewish tragedy. We talk about it because we believe the world must not be allowed to forget that twelve million innocent human beings, six million of them Jews, were murdered by the Nazis. Yom HaShoah seeks to ensure that a crime of such proportions will never be allowed to happen again. We keep the memory of the Holocaust alive to guard against the wanton destruction of any people.
In the Quad Cities, Yom HaShoah has been observed annually since 1982. In addition to the memorial service, the planning committee works with the Quad Cities Holocaust Education Committee to present awards to local students for research and creative work exploring or responding to the Holocaust.
More information is available by contacting the Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities at 309.793.1300, or by email at [email protected].
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