Remarks by Hon. Joan Cohen on Yom Hashoah Resolve – Maine State Legislature

I am honored and humbled to have my name attached to this important resolve.

We face the reality that the generation of those who survived the Holocaust is quickly disappearing as is the generation of those brave American soldiers who liberated them from the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp system.

I have no doubt that when survivor and liberator met on that cold, gray day in April or May 1945, they both believed that one had experienced and one had witnessed the worst one human could inflict upon another and still be called a human being. I believe that both survivor and liberator thought that such an event as the Holocaust could never be duplicated, that with the evil of the Nazi wars against the Jews and against humanity now defeated, a new era of human understanding and dignity might begin in the ashes of a discredited civilization.

How wrong they were to believe in such an optimism. What we have seen since 1945, since we pledged never again, since we outlawed genocide, the destruction of a racial, political or relgious group, is more of the same. In Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur, and a dozen other places of indescribable killing, the willing executioners have stepped forward and killed and killed again.

Don’t the survivors and the liberators deserve better? Our nation and our State believe they do. That is why we have placed a national museum on the Holocaust in the heart of America’s sacred space in our nation’s capitol. That is why we have placed a center on the Holocaust and genocide on the campus of the University of Maine here in Augusta, in the sacred space of our State’s capitol. And that is why the University of Maine at Augusta has just approved a new minor in Holocaust, Genocide and human rights studies that will begin in the fall.

In these museums, and in many more across our nation, Americans will learn what both victim and liberator understood on the fateful day of their meeting: that we must defeat the evil of genocide before it devours us. That only by being vigilant in our defense of liberty and human rights for all can we indeed dream of a world free from future Holocausts and genocides.

On Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust day of remembrance, we will stop and remember those who died, those who survived and those who freed them from the indescribable horrors. But on the very next day, we will have to do more. Our survivors and our liberators should expect no less.