Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2025

"Out of the Depths: The Anguish of Liberation and Rebirth: Marking 80 Years since the Defeat of Nazi Germany" - Yad Vashem

 

Never Forget   

We must never forget what happened and remain vigilant now and in the future to battle against the mass destruction of innocent human beings.  Polls in 2020 showed that new generations are ignorant of the Holocaust are deeply troubling. Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, remembers the six million Jewish people murdered in the Nazi Holocaust, and continuing forms of antisemitism in the world today.

Equally troubling today is a tyrant that wages aggressive war and commits atrocities to “de-Nazify” a democratic country led by a Jewish president.

Vladimir Putin would like the world to forget the Soviet Union's historic collaboration with Nazis in starting WW2, and Moscow's demonizing of the Jewish people through to the present day, but we owe it to the victims to remember the full history. Juliana Geran Pilon in her March 11, 2022 OpEd "Putin’s ‘De-Nazification’ Claim Began With Marx and Stalin: Anti-Semitic myths have long been a staple of communist ideology and Soviet disinformation" summarized and sourced this history in this excerpt.

Still, as the historian Robert S. Wistrich wrote, “it was only after 1967 that antisemitism and anti-Zionism would assume a truly systematic and organized character. . . . In place of the relentless Nazi myth about ‘Jewish Bolshevism,’ the Soviet Communists began to fabricate the equally mendacious thesis of ‘Jewish Nazism.’ ”

The idea of a Zionist-imperialist-fascist-American conspiracy culminated in the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution, passed in 1975 by a majority of United Nations member states. By the time the resolution was repealed in 1991, it had done significant damage. Osama bin Laden believed the fantasies of the “Protocols,” Mr. Wistrich wrote in his book “A Lethal Obsession.” The jihadist’s conviction that the world is run by a capitalist, Jewish cabal explains why the 9/11 suicide hijackers expected the World Trade Center to be full of Jews.

Placed in its historical context, this myth of antifascism, anti-Nazism and anti-Zionism is far more than rhetoric.

As Santayana observed, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. This is why we must remember and say never again.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

~ Primo Levi (z’l), Auschwitz survivor.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas, an Iranian proxy, invaded and attacked Israel killing 1,200 and taking 240 hostages. This strike ignited a Middle East war between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas, which has its base of operations in Gaza. 

This was the largest mass killing of Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Equally shocking was how this mass slaughter of Jewish people ignited anti-Semites around the World. 

In the midst of this barbarism and evil on October 7th, official Cuban journalist  Pedro Jorge Velázquez , who goes by the pseudonym  El Necio on X.cited Che Guevara's visit to Gaza in 1959 as an inflection point that turned Palestine into a world cause, and posted photos of the Argentine guerilla with Middle East leaders during his visit. 

El Necio libels Israel calling it a "Zionist colonization" without recognizing the fact tha the Jewish people are indigenous to this their ancestral lands. He claims that Guevara is the inspiration for the "resistance" i.e. terrorist barbarism taking place today, and concludes his rant with "Che Lives."  

Regime agents translated their virtual slander into real world action the next day.

On October 8, 2023, one day after the terror attacks in Israel, militant leftists held a protest in Times Square to celebrate the terrorist attack as a form of resistance, yelling anti-Semitic slogans and waving banners and posters. On October 11, 2023, The People’s Forum (TPF) released a statement justifying their October 8th demonstration in Times Square and reaffirming their support for the rampage. Manolo De Los Santos, the group’s co-executive director, is a researcher at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, with links to the Cuban dictatorship, and he was  “based out of Cuba for many years.” 

On January 24, 2024, Manolo De Los Santos said the quiet part out loud at The People’s Forum in New York City: “When we finally deal that ultimate blow to annihilate Israel. When the state of Israel is completely abolished and obliterated from history, it will be the single most powerful blow we can deliver against capitalism.“

I have attended meetings in the United States were those who identify as progressive would begin the meeting with a land acknowledgement. The Smithsonian Museum's National Museum of the American Indian on their website Native Knowledge 360° provides the following description of the practice.

Land acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many Native nations and communities. Today, land acknowledgments are used by Native Peoples and non-Natives to recognize Indigenous Peoples who are the original stewards of the lands on which we now live. Before public events and other important gatherings hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian, a speaker offers this acknowledgment displayed in the quote container on behalf of everyone present.

After millennia of Native history, and centuries of displacement and dispossession, acknowledging original Indigenous inhabitants is complex. Many places in the Americas have been home to different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer live on lands to which they have ancestral ties.

The Jewish people are indigenous to the land they live on today, and lands inhabited by Palestinians, such as Gaza and the West Bank. Three thousand years ago the state of Israel was dominated by a Jewish community, until they were taken over by the Roman Empire in 63 BC and turned into a protectorate to rule over them, until the Romans crushed them, and drove many of them out of their homeland for violently resisting imperial rule beginning in 66 AD, the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD and Jewish resisters to occupation were scattered across the Roman Empire in modern day Iraq, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Eastern Europe. 

Nevertheless throughout all this time there has been a continuous presence in what is today Israel.  We should also remember that today, and demonstrate our solidarity with this people who have suffered so much for so long.

Reflection On Nonviolence On Good Friday : Jesus’ Third Way

How to resist evil without doing evil.

And behold, one of those who accompanied Jesus put his hand to his sword, drew it, and struck the high priest's servant, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Matthew 26.51-52

The essence of Jesus's teachings is found in his Sermon on the Mount, and it moved Mohandas Gandhi greatly, and he embraced it.

"I have not been able to see any difference between the Sermon on the Mount and the Bhagavadgita. What the Sermon describes in a graphic manner, the Bhagavadgita reduces to a scientific formula. It may not be a scientific book in the accepted sense of the term, but it has argued out the law of love — the law of abandon as I would call it — in a scientific manner. The Sermon on the Mount gives the same law in wonderful language.  ... Today supposing I was deprived of the Gita and forgot all its contents but had a copy of the Sermon, I should derive the same joy from it as I do from the Gila."

This video contains audio and text of the entire Sermon on the Mount.

Christians who believe in the message of Jesus of Nazareth demonstrate that belief in actual practice as did a group of Catholic Monks in Algeria in 1996 now made known to the world in the film Of Gods and Men.  

Others continue to do so today around the world. What better day than Good Friday to reflect on those who took up the cross and followed and continue to follow Jesus?

James Morris Lawson Jr.spent his entire life following Jesus until his death at age 95 in June 2024. He was a Methodist minister, and a nonviolence practitioner.

Reverend James Lawson, prepared students for nonviolent action at a Fellowship of Reconciliation workshop  over half a century ago where he revealed its fundamental Christian nature.

"When you are a child of God... you try thereby to imitate Jesus, in the midst of evil. Which means, if someone slaps you on the one cheek, you turn the other cheek, which is an act of resistance. It means that you do not only love your neighbor, but you recognize that even the enemy has a spark of God in them, has been made in the image of God and therefore needs to be treated as you, yourself, want to be treated Jesus is very clear about this: "do unto others as you want others to do unto you." — which is a rather powerful ethic for personal relationships, regardless of whether family or school or community or nation." 

The documentary "A Force More Powerful" is about non-violence, and its power to change the world over the past century. It is worth noticing that faith and belief played a major role in these movements that achieved positive and lasting change.

Reverend Lawson is featured in the documentary and has been called the "architect of the civil rights movement." The good Reverend observed that “if you want to understand King, you must look at Jesus.” The message of Jesus and the example of what he went through on Good Friday, and the manner in which he did it is a powerful study in nonviolence, of taking on suffering, while forgiving your enemies.

Holy Week is a good moment to reflect on the teachings of Jesus, and especially this passage from  Matthew 5.38-41.

"You have learnt how it was said: 'Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.' But I say to you, Offer the wicked man no resistance. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; if a man takes you to law and would have your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone orders you to go one mile, go two miles with him." Matthew 5.38-41

 Biblical scholar Walter Wink offers the following analysis, and looks to both history, and language to examine the third way offered by Jesus.

April 13th is the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Katyn Massacre.

 "To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night

The Soviet Union claimed to enter Poland in September of 1939 to "take care" of the people and seven months later beginning in April 1940 they had executed 22,000 Polish officers and buried them in mass graves in what became known as the Katyn Massacre.

Today is the day of remembrance for the victims. Let us remember and place this crime into its historic context.

On September 17, 1939 with "between 600–650,000 soldiers and over 5,000 thousand Red Army tanks  [of the Soviet Union] invaded the Second Polish Republic, which had been fighting against German aggression since 1 September."

The Soviet Union "invaded Poland on the pretext that ‘the Polish country and its government ceased to exist’. Consequently, ‘the USSR had to take care of the people who lived in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus and their possessions’ as the Soviet propaganda referred to the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic." ... " About 230,000 [Polish] soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Bolsheviks."

Today, state commemoration of the victims of the 1940 #KatynMassacre took place in the Katyn Museum in Warsaw. Deputy President Krzysztof Szwagrzyk represented the IPN at the 85th anniversary event, jointly organized by the Office for War Veterans and Victims of Oppression, Katyn… pic.twitter.com/kiQ2tK5zvo

— Institute of National Remembrance (@ipngovpl_eng) April 13, 2025

The reality was that the Soviets had entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that included secret protocols dividing up Poland. Nazi and Soviet troops met in the middle of Poland and exchanged pleasantries in September of 1939. 

The Soviet precursor to the KGB was the NKVD. "From October 1939, the delegated NKVD officials from Moscow heard the prisoners, encouraged them to cooperate and collected data. Only a few of the prisoners agreed to collaborate. The commanding officers’ reports included opinions about hostile attitudes of the Poles and a minimal chance of them being useful to the USSR authorities."

The decision to shoot the prisoners was signed on March 5, 1940 by seven members of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) authorities: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria (proposer), Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.

On #KatynMemorialDay, we remember victims of the #Katyn massacre.
20,000+ Polish army officers, police, border guard officers, intelligentsia were murdered by the Soviets 83 years ago, in line with Stalin's orders.
Among them were 100s of Polish Jews, incl. rabbi Baruch Steinberg pic.twitter.com/GmXRHTVnQx

— AJC Central Europe (@AJC_CE) April 13, 2023

The lists of those sent to death were to be prepared and signed by Piotr Soprunienko, commander-in-chief of the Prisoners of War Board of People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which was created by the order of Beria in September 1939

In the Spring of 1940 the Soviet secret police began to shoot the prisoners in the back of the head or in the neck and burying them in mass graves.

Smolensk–Katyn
On 3 April, the first prisoners from Kozelsk were transported in cattle trucks through Smolensk to Gniezdovo, where smaller groups were transported by prison cars commonly called ‘czornyje worony’ (‘black ravens’) to the wilderness called Kozie Gory in Katyn Forest. The functionaries of the NKVD killed each person by shooting in the back of the head. By 11 May, 1940, 4,421 Polish citizens had been killed and buried in Katyn death pits. There is an assumption that some officers had been killed in Smolensk²⁸.

Kharkov–Piatykhatky
The first group of prisoners from Starobelsk camp was transported to the headquarters of the Board of Kharkov NKVD district on 5 April 1940. Every night in the basement of the building in Dscherschinski Street executioners killed prisoners by shooting in the neck. The trucks carried the bodies to the pits in Forest Park in Kharkov, a kilometer and a half to Piatykhatky village. By 12 May 3,820 Polish citizens had been killed in Kharkov²⁹.

Kalinin (Tver)–Miednoye
On 4 April, 1940, the NKVD started to send prisoners from Ostashkov to the headquarters of the Board of Kalinin NKVD district (today’s Tver) at 6 Soviet Street. The executions took place in the basements. The same method of killing was used: a shot to the neck. In the mornings trucks carried the bodies to the pits in Miednoye village, 30 kilometers further away. By 22 May, 1940, 6,311 Polish citizens had been killed in Kalinin. What is worth mentioning when it comes to the Katyn lie, is that the territory of Miednoye cemetery has never belonged to Germany³⁰.

Polish authorities built war cemeteries at the places where the officers’ bodies had been buried. The cemeteries were officially opened in the year 2000. (in Kharkov on 17 June, in Katyn on 28 July and on 2 September in Miednoye)³¹.

Survivors
Only 395 people from the three camps survived. Some of them owed their rescue to pure chance. Several people were willing to fight on the Soviet side in case of German invasion. There were also agents among them, the same ones as the NKVD had in the camps. The officers who were arrested in the camps and transported to NKVD Lubyanka prison in Moscow also managed to escape death in the summer of 1940³².

The Guardian summed up the crime as follows: "Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, in one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century."

Eighty years ago in the Spring of 1943 the crime of Katyn was first discovered, but the Soviets denied their role in the crime. 

13 April 1943 | The German radio broadcasted the news about the discovery in Katyn Forest of mass graves of Polish prisoners of war murdered by Soviet NKVD in 1940.

Today in Poland we observe the Day of Remembrance of Victims of the #Katyn Massacre. https://t.co/5xaU5Fnkxk pic.twitter.com/f1i4TxhcpA

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) April 13, 2025

Forty seven years later on April 13, 1990 the Soviet Union admitted its guilt in the 1940 Katyn Massacre.

“Katyń came to symbolize Polish war losses,” historian Adam Zamoyski told TVP World. Eighty-five years after its discovery, the massacre remains a defining wound in Poland’s national memory. pic.twitter.com/OtTv0b156t

— TVP World (@TVPWorld_com) April 13, 2025

Bacardi’s long fight for a free and independent Cuba continues

 NBC’s The Today Show featured a segment looking back at the spirited history of BACARDI on April 3, 2025, from the company’s founding in Santiago de Cuba in 1862, expropriation by Castro’s communist dictatorship, to their ongoing success, but much was left out.

Bacardi’s history is intrinsically related to the fight for Cuban independence from Spain, the defense of democracy during the Republic, and the ongoing struggle for the restoration of democracy and the rule of law under the current communist dictatorship. The Bacardi family arrived in Colonial Cuba from Spain in the early 1800s. In 1828, Don Facundo Bacardi Massó joined his older brothers in Santiago, Cuba, where Bacardi Limited was founded by him on February 4, 1862. Don Facundo had three sons who went into the family business: Emilio Bacardi Moreau, Juan Bacardi Moreau, and Facundo Bacardi Moreau.

Emilio Bacardi Moreau was born in Santiago de Cuba on June 5, 1844, the son of Facundo Bacardí Massó,who together with his father was arrested by Spanish loyalist forces for their support of Cuban independence. Don Facundo was released shortly afterwards, but his son Emilio spent four years imprisoned, and then forced into exile. Don Facundo passed away at age 71 on May 9, 1886.

Emilio Bacardi Moreau’s son, Emilio Bacardi Lay, actively took part in Cuba’s war of independence. In 1895, he was a field officer for Gen. Antonio Maceo during the invasion of Cuba by independence forces. He reached the rank of colonel by the age of 22. After a life of entrepreneurship and patriotic service, Emilio Bacardi Moreau died on August 28, 1922, of a heart ailment. He was 78 years old. The city of Santiago suspended all public events for two days to mourn and celebrate his life. He had been nicknamed “Cuba’s foremost son.”

Emilio Bacardi Lay, who had fought for Cuban independence and been opposed to the dictatorships of Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista but remained in Cuba and repeatedly resisted authoritarianism, was forced to flee when Castroism consolidated control in 1961. Emilio Bacardi Lay, who was born in Santiago de Cuba on June 12, 1877, died in exile in Miami on October 14, 1972 at the age of 95. He was the last surviving ranking officer from Cuba’s war of independence with Spain.

Emilio Bacardi Lay ( Source: Cuba en la memoria )

A history of the Bacardi family written by Tom Gjelten, a reporter for National Public Radio, titled “Bacardi and The Long Fight for Cuba :The Biography of a Cause,” led to renewed interest in their role in Cuba’s independence.  A 2008 review of the book in The New York Times by Randy Kennedy touches on the figure of Emilio Bacardi Moreau.

Emilio Bacardi, especially, comes to life as the book’s most powerful character, though one so strange that Gabriel García Márquez might have invented him. Emilio was imprisoned twice by Spain off the coast of Morocco for his revolutionary activities. But he still managed to hold the company together, to serve as Santiago’s mayor during the unsettled years of the American occupation, to help found a salon called the Victor Hugo Freethinker Group, to practice theosophy in a predominantly Catholic country and to track down a genuine mummy on a trip to Egypt, which he bought as the centerpiece for a museum he had founded in San­tiago. (Modest he was not; he signed his revolutionary correspondence with the name Phocion, after the Athenian statesman known as “the good.”)

Bacardi Imports, Inc., re-established its headquarters in Miami in 1963 after having been based for a century in Santiago de Cuba.

This is the history that the Castros would like to erase but have been unable to. Meanwhile, to all who read this, please consider that if you wish to make a toast to freedom with alcoholic spirits, do it with Bacardi or the real Havana Club.

However, it is important to point out that Bacardi, in addition to having a great history, also retain an enlightened vision for the future that is human centered.  Today, an article appeared that revealed how Bacardi is putting money behind people to make sure artificial intelligence doesn’t replace human bartenders.

Bacardi also has a positive track record on environmental stewardship that has been repeatedly recognized. Bacardi USA was awarded the SmartWay® Excellence Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the fourth time in 2020.

In contrast, the Cuban dictatorship continues to sell their stolen version of Havana Club, that today “pumps 1,288 cubic meters of waste liquids into the Chipriona inlet in Cuba every day, mostly vinasse (a residual liquid remaining from the fermentation and distillation of alcoholic liquors). It has been doing that since the 1990s, although the problems became more acute starting in 2007,” according to Julio Batista in his 2017 report described the impact of this pollution as follows:

“The Chipriona inlet is a place where no one goes, where no one fishes, that doesn’t need a fence because no one wants to swim in the boiling filth that flows into its waters every day. The waters of what used to be a beach are now soupy and have the sour smell of decomposition. No studies about the marine life in the inlet are publicly available, but fishermen say there’s no fish there.” …”In the last decade, Chipriona has become the drainage point for the Ronera Sana Cruz, the biggest distillery in the country and one of the four owned by Cuba Ron S.A. It’s the end point of the sewage of the only place where the white and 3-year-old brands are distilled by Havana Club International (HCI). And the dumping ground for a company that earned $118.5 million in profits in 2016 from the sale of 4.2 million boxes each with nine liters of rum.”

 Bacardi has recognized the work of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, and in 2017 that of his daughter, Rosa María Payá and they are supporting the Cuba Decide initiative to push for a democratic transition in Cuba.

Bacardi is synonymous with the best of Republican Cuba. Generations of the Bacardi family fought for Cuban independence with one family member fighting alongside General Antonio Maceo, and during the Republic the family not only had enlightened business practices but also engaged in civic activities that promoted a democratic culture based in the rule of law. Through their marketing, Bacardi put Cuba on the map. They continue in the long fight for a free and independent Cuba.

 

57 years ago Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at 6:01pm in Memphis, Tennessee

 "If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. ... I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others." - Martin Luther King Jr., 'Drum Major' sermon February 4, 1968.

6:01pm CST at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01pm CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he died at 7:05pm. Reverend King was in Memphis to support sanitation workers on strike.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had scaled the heights of American rhetoric the night before, on April 3, 1968, deconstructing the case for violence and reaffirming nonviolent resistance.

57 years ago today, you were assassinated.

We remember you.
We respect you.
We cherish you.
We honor you.#MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #KingsLastDay #thankyouMLK pic.twitter.com/0kbyGpvMkm

— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center (@TheKingCenter) April 4, 2025

The King Center provided the following abstract summary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I've Been to the Mountaintop speech on April 3, 1968 in their website:

Dr. King gave this address at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee the night before he was assassinated. He called for nonviolent protest and a boycott of Memphis area businesses in support of the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike. Conveying a sense of foreboding, he not only recounted a near-death experience when he was stabbed near the heart, but also spoke of the possibility of his own demise at the hands of those who opposed him.

In this speech Reverend King outlined the purpose of the overall nonviolent struggle in broad terms:

 "And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying -- We are saying that we are God's children. And that we are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live."

Funeral services were held for Reverend King on April 9, 1968. Coretta Scott King requested that King eulogize himself: His last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a recording of his famous 'Drum Major' sermon, given on February 4, 1968, was played at the funeral.  The King family held solemn services for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, attended by thousands including the then Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Richard Nixon.

🧵It wasn’t that long ago.

On the 57th anniversary of the day he was assassinated…here are some in-color photos of my father. 🖤#MLK #KingsLastDay #thankyouMLK pic.twitter.com/uX4SqwW6PQ

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) April 4, 2025

Meanwhile in Memphis the local government met the demands that had been made by Reverend King and the striking sanitation workers.

The King family went on to found the King Center and continued his nonviolent legacy to the present day. Other activists from King's inner circle continued their civil rights work, while some, like John Lewis, entered political life and continued working to realize Reverend King's beloved community in the U.S. Congress.