The United Church of Christ sends calendars annually to churches and active and retired pastors. Each Sabbath is accompanied by the appointed lessons for the day along with suggested sermon themes. Significant dates and recurring observances are also noted, such as Orthodox Christmas, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to name a few for January. In addition, each calendar carries a theme of its own. Drawing from Luke 5:4, this year’s theme is Into The Deep. Sadly, I went deep into disappointment when I discovered that the Marketing and Communications Office of National Ministries had made a hugely regrettable omission by not remembering that January 27, 2025, is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. NEVER FORGET and NEVER AGAIN are two of the poignant phrases powerfully associated with the day, and we forgot to recognize it on our church calendar!
This year’s observance represents the 80th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz, an extermination camp whose victims numbered 1.1 million. Counted among them were Jews, Poles, Soviet POWs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, other ethnic groups, homosexuals, and gypsies. Elie Wiesel wrote of his time there as a fifteen year old in the following way:
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live
as long as God Himself.
Never.
Never Shall I Forget from Night by Elie Wiesel.
Copyright © 1958 by Les Editions de Minuit.
Translation copyright © 2006 by Marion Wiesel.
AND WE MUST NEVER FORGET. I have visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., and more locally situated, the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Educational Center of Florida in Maitland. Ground will soon be broken for the new Holocaust Museum for Hope and Humanity in the cultural corridor in Orlando, Florida. That museum will be completed in 2026. I look forward to visiting it.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Keir Starmer and his wife, Victoria, visited Auschwitz on Monday, one week before the 80th anniversary of the liberation. Of the visit he said:
Nothing could prepare me for the sheer horror of what I have seen in this place. It is utterly harrowing. The mounds of hair, the shoes, the suitcases, the names and details, everything that was so meticulously kept, except for human life.
…Sir Keir said the experience would stay with me for the rest of my life.
So too, will my determination to defend that truth, to fight the poison of antisemitism and hatred in all its forms, and to do everything I can to make ‘never again’ mean what it says, and what it must truly mean: never again.
This week, I watched a movie called, The Zone of Interest. It is about the house located just outside the gates of Auschwitz and the life in it for the family of the commandant, Rudolf Höss. Andrew Higgins, writing for the New York Times, published an article recently titled: A House at Auschwitz Opens Its Doors to a Chilling Past. (NYT; January 15, 2025; updated January 17, 2025) The house is now included in the museum experience, and it will receive visitors for the first time as part of the 80th anniversary. Jacek Purski, the director of a Polish anti-extremism group, who is involved in the project, said he wants to use the house and the past Nazi horrors as a weapon against what he sees as a resurgence of extremist ideologies.
A house is a house,” Mr. Purski said, looking out of a second-story window of the former Höss house toward the chimney of a former Nazi crematory. But it is in uninteresting, regular houses like this where extremism is happening today.
What a powerful statement! Do you think that is true? Might it be true of us and our time? I fear that it is.
The former Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, was asked in an interview what it was like serving in the Biden administration in a “post truth” era. The idea of being in a post-truth era is new to me, even though I know that the current president is the Liar- in-Chief, and much of his presidential campaign depended on the effective lie-a-minute dissemination of falsehoods. In fact, since he last won in 2016, I understand that Oxford Dictionaries declared that its international word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth.”
A deeper dive into the idea revealed interesting and alarming truths. First, A TED Talk done by Yuval Noah Harari in 2018 titled “Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species” claimed that truth and power are not cooperative companions. He wrote:
Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later, they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.
I am still pondering the weight and wisdom of that claim, and I invite you to ponder with me.
Second, Harari wrote something directly pertinent to the subject at hand.
Ancient religions have not been the only ones to use fiction to cement cooperation. In more recent times, each nation has created its own national mythology, while movements such as communism, fascism and liberalism fashioned elaborate self-reinforcing credos. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro, allegedly explained his method thus: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote, “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.
Today, we are under siege by one of those self-reinforcing credos. Power and truth have taken separate paths and within uninteresting, regular houses, our homes, citizens have listened to and believed the lies of extremism and given their permission to the wealthy and powerful to target our nation’s most vulnerable as a solution to our ills and insecurities. Pope Francis has already spoken out on Trump’s proposed plans for the mass deportation of immigrants saying:
If it is true, it will be a disgrace, because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill for the imbalance.
So much for the beginning of America’s Golden Age!
We need to participate in Monday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, making sure that we know the horrible truths of that era and ours. We must speak truth to power, the alternate truth about the power of compassion and empathy, equity and inclusion, justice, and love and how we must use these in the fight against the poison of antisemitism and hatred in all its forms. NEVER FORGET and NEVER AGAIN!
Let me conclude not with a criticism but a compliment for the United Church of Christ Calendar. Sunday’s appointed Gospel lesson and suggested sermon theme are spot on! The gospel lesson is Luke 4:14-30. This Lukan account is about Jesus’ return to his boyhood home of Nazareth, where He enters the synagogue and declares to the powerful who He is, why He is there and most importantly, for whom.
16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
In the verses that follow, He talks poignantly about vulnerable widows, the scarcity and suffering caused by famine and the painful ostracism of people with leprosy. In response to such chutzpa, they ran him out of town! No surprise.
So, let us never forget… never again!