Mark Udall: “today is Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, known in Hebrew as Yom Hashoah. This is an appropriate date for…”

“today is Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, known in Hebrew as Yom Hashoah. This is an appropriate date for this purpose because it is the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But in reality, Americans and all other civilized people should consider every day a Holocaust Remembrance Day because forgetting the evils of the past can too easily be the prelude to their recurrence. And never was this truer than this year, as we mark the 60th anniversary of the final days of the Second World War when Allied soldiers moving across Europe encountered and liberated concentration camp prisoners. Advancing from the west, U.S. divisions freed the prisoners in the Dora-Mittelbau, Buchenwald, Flossenburg, and Dachau concentration camps in Germany and the Mauthausen camp in Austria. In northern Germany, British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme. And Soviet troops, after liberating Auschwitz in Poland in January 1945, in May, 1945 liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbruck concentration camps inside Germany. We now understand that many people in Allied countries had known, in greater or lesser detail, about what had occurred in the camps. But it was these Allied soldiers who fully exposed the full horror of Nazi atrocities--and the combat-hardened soldiers were unprepared for what they found. There were stacks of dead bodies, and barracks filled with dead and dying prisoners, while the stench of death was everywhere.…”