Highlights Archives
Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazi German government murdered 6 million Jews (two out of every three European Jews) between 1939 and 1945. More than 3 million Russian prisoners of war, tens of thousands of Gypsies, and at least 200,000 disabled persons met the same fate. Thousands of Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, social democrats, communists, trade unionists, Polish intellectuals, and other "undesirables" also died at the hands of the Nazis. After World War II, Israel's parliament proclaimed Yom Hashoah U'Mered HaGetaot (Holocaust and Ghetto Revolt Remembrance Day, later simplified to Yom Hashoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day) to be the 27th of Nissan. This year, Yom Hashoah falls on April 25.
More than 140,000 Holocaust survivors came to the United States. The number who settled in Wisconsin is difficult to determine, although estimates place it between 1,000 and 2,000 people. One survivor of Auschwitz who settled in Wisconsin was veterinarian Tadeusz "Ted" Kowalczyk, who became a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He died in 1970. After his death, his family donated this sweater, which he had worn at Auschwitz and two other concentration camps, to the Society's museum. He told his story in a 1963 letter later published by Brush Wolf Press of Marshfield, Wisconsin.
Between 1974 and 1981, the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Jewish Archives worked together to interview 23 other survivors of Nazi oppression in Europe who had settled in Wisconsin. These interviews eventually filled 160 hours of audio tape and generated four boxes of transcripts, five megabytes of electronic text, and 700 photographs that are available for research in the Society's archives. In 1997 the Society excerpted highlights from the 160 hours of interviews in Remembering the Holocaust, edited by Michael E. Stevens and Ellen D. Goldlust-Gingrich. Although this helped disseminate the survivors' words, it only made available about 1 percent of all the information on the audio tapes. Three of the interviews in that book have been put online, and the Society has applied for private funding to digitize the entire collection of audio, text and images for presentation on the Web.
In 1948 the international community responded to Nazi Germany's methodically orchestrated acts of genocide by approving the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Although this document was signed by President Truman, the Senate did not ratify it nor did Congress pass any similar provision outlawing genocide in the United States. Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire championed this cause, passionately believing that the U.S. ought to formally support the U.N. resolution, and between 1967 and 1988 he delivered more than 3,000 speeches on the subject. The Senate finally adopted a ratification resolution in February 1986. Proxmire's own "Genocide Convention Implementation Act" passed in 1987, and President Ronald Reagan signed it at the end of Proxmire's Senate career on November 4, 1988. A mimeographed copy of testimony Proxmire gave during the middle of his two-decade campaign to make genocide illegal under U.S. law is provided online at Turning Points in Wisconsin History.
:: Posted April 24, 2006
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