Israel: PM Modi visits Yad Vashem, pays tribute to martyrs; Nazis killed 6 million Jews in Holocaust

New Delhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has arrived at Yad Vashem in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also present with him. PM Modi visited the relics of Holocaust victims and paid his respects to them. This place serves as a reminder of the Holocaust. The personal belongings of millions of people who lost their lives during the Holocaust are stored here as a memento.

In fact, during the Nazi regime in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler launched an infamous campaign against Jews known as the “Final Solution,” which is known as the Holocaust. During World War II, large concentration camps were built in Nazi-occupied territories for the genocide of Jews, where millions of Jews were killed by poisonous gas.

The Holocaust was the mass genocide of millions of European Jews, Romani people, mentally disabled people, political dissidents, and Nazi opponents by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Approximately six million Jews and approximately five million other people were killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of those killed were children.

The word Holocaust
is derived from two Greek words: ‘holos’ and ‘kaustos’. ‘Holos’ means whole, and ‘kaustos’ means burned. Historically, it was used by Jews to refer to the sacrifices burned on the altar. The Nazi regime massacred Jews by burning and gassing them.

How the Holocaust Began
In September 1939, Germany invaded western Poland, marking the beginning of World War II. German police quickly forced thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettos. Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, starvation and epidemics raged in the Polish ghettos.

In the winter of 1939, Nazi authorities initiated a euthanasia program. Under this program, 70,000 mentally and physically ill Jews held captive in Germany were identified, brought to Poland, and then confined en masse in chambers and poisoned with poison gas. This was the initial phase of the Holocaust.

Then, in 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, occupying Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from across the continent, as well as millions of European Roma people, were deported to ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland.

At the Auschwitz concentration camp near Krakow, Poland, experiments were already underway on methods of mass murder. People were killed en masse by poisoning with poison gas. Jews were subjected to various forms of massacre here. Sometimes, Jews were locked up in these concentration camps and set on fire or thrown into furnaces.

Poland became a site of Jewish extermination.
In late 1941, the Germans began mass deportations from Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland to concentration camps. This began with those considered least useful. These included the sick, the elderly, and the infirm, as well as small children. The first mass gas chamber executions began on March 17, 1942, at the Belzec extermination camp near Lublin. Five more extermination camps were established in occupied Poland: Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and the largest, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews from all over Europe, including areas under German control as well as Germany’s allies, were deported to extermination camps and concentration camps. The most severe deportations occurred during the summer and autumn of 1942, when over 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone. All were taken to extermination camps and murdered.

1.1 million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz alone.
Approximately 1.1 million people were murdered in Auschwitz alone, a massive industrial genocide. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners worked in the labor camp there. Jews constituted a disproportionately large number of those killed in the gas chambers.

The creation of Israel began
after World War II, when pressure mounted on the Allied Powers to create a homeland for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. This led to international support for the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, which paved the way for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Following the establishment of Israel, a massive World Holocaust Remembrance Center was established in Jerusalem in the 1950s. It began collecting firsthand accounts from survivors and mementos of victims. This Holocaust memorial was named Yad Vashem.

Yad Vashem holds the memory of the Holocaust.
Orit Noiman, head of the private sector archive at Yad Vashem, told The Jerusalem Post that every object here is a kind of silent testimony to the Holocaust. Through them, we can tell a personal story of the victims. For so many years, Yad Vashem has been documenting the personal stories of Holocaust victims, yet much information remains unavailable.

Noiman said Yad Vashem has always collected such items, but in 2011 it intensified its appeal to the public to share family heirlooms and restructured its collection process to be more systematic, focusing not only on the object itself but also on the story behind it.

Today, under the Gathering the Fragments project, the Center holds over 200 million pages of Holocaust memory from various sources, such as Nazi materials and eyewitness accounts, as well as over 31,500 artifacts. Through these relics, Yad Vashem preserves the memory of the Holocaust, a reminder of the greatest struggle for Jewish survival.