Repost from State.gov
By Hannah Rosenthal
Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
May 30, 2012
As a child of a Holocaust survivor, anti-Semitism is something very personal to me. I am the daughter of a man who was literally marked by a badge of “difference” – a yellow star that not only made him stand out as non-German in the eyes of the Nazis, but also placed a bounty on his head. A survivor of Buchenwald, my father experienced what hate, left unchecked, can do. As a result of his experiences, he instilled in me an urgency to fight not only anti-Semitism, but also intolerance in all of its forms.
The Holocaust is one of the darkest chapters of human history – a democratically elected leader was allowed to turn hatred into genocide because good people didn’t stop him. Good people didn’t stand up and prevent the cattle cars from carrying their neighbors to the gas chambers. Good people didn’t say no when their neighbors were stripped of their German citizenship simply because they were Jewish. Yes, there were thousands of rescuers – a fact I talk about widely – but it was not enough. Society failed and millions of Jews, Roma, and LGBT individuals were the innocent victims of what the power of hatred left unchecked can achieve. Continue Reading.
