Remembrance Day in Atlanta honors Holocaust victims

A drizzly rain seemed fitting to some of the several hundred people who gathered Sunday in southwest Atlanta to remember the Holocaust.

“The rain was perfect for today,” said Shlomiah Fitzpatrick of Lawrenceville. “It’s like the whole heavens cried.”

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Kimberly Smith/ksmith@ajc.com

Perry Brickman of Atlanta pauses to take a photo of the Memorial to the Six Million who perished in the Holocaust following the annual remembrance service Sunday at Greenwood Cemetery in Atlanta.

Photos: Scenes from the Remembrance

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The 44th annual Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemoration was held at Greenwood Cemetery’s Memorial to the Six Million. The memorial, which honors Holocaust victims, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places last year.

Holocaust survivors from France, Germany, Poland and Greece took turns to light the monument’s six tall torches. Then came remarks from Holocaust survivor Ben Walker, a native of Romania.

“It is our responsibility and our duty to remember the Holocaust,” Walker told the assembled. “We must make every effort for such a massacre never to take place again.”

Walker said he never discussed the Holocaust until the terrorist attacks of Sept, 11, 2001, “when I realized that extreme hatred can kill, once again, innocent people.” Now, as a member of The William Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Museum’s speakers bureau, he tells his story to anyone who will listen.

On Sunday, the Sandy Springs resident described the Warsaw Ghetto where nearly a half million Jews were crowded into a small area surrounded by thick walls and barbed wire. Sunday marked the 66th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 19, 1943.

Walker said he was 6 years old when his family was corralled onto a crowded train car, shipped off to the town of Mogilev and later sent on a muddy, freezing march to a rural area of Transnistria, a region of southwest Ukraine.

More than 280,000 Jews died there, he said. “There are no memorials, only mass graves that are uncovered, from time to time,” Walker said, “when workers are placing new pipes for gas or water lines.”

As Walker finished his talk, the rainfall grew heavy. Children and adults joined the Atlanta Jewish Male Choir in singing “Ani Ma’amin,” a song reportedly penned to holy words in a cattle car packed with Jews being taken to a Nazi death camp.

Rabbi Yossi Lew, of Congregation Beth Tefillah in Sandy Springs, thought of the three trips he’s made with local high school students for a weeklong trip to Poland called the March of the Living. During the trip, the teens march from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Holocaust Memorial Day. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi concentration camp complex built during World War II.

“Each time you go the impact becomes stronger despite the fact you know exactly what you’re going to see,” Rabbi Lew said. “The experience become more powerful precisely because of what happened there.”

Among the last to leave Sunday’s gathering was Jody Frankel, a local woman who created a book in 1997 to represent Holocaust victims. In it, the word “Jew” is printed six million times. Though the font is tiny, maybe .5, Frankel said, the book is more than half a foot thick.