International Holocaust Remembrance Day
January 26, 2025
Holocaust Museum Los Angeles
Liberation after Liberation

Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Dr. Paul Schneider and I am very proud to welcome you to the 2025 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at Holocaust Museum LA on behalf of the 2G group to which I belong, the Shoah Legacy Writers. Today we remember the event of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 by the 60th Soviet Army. And by extension, we remember the greater liberation of the surviving remnant of approximately 250,000 Jewish souls, the She’arith ha-pletah, after the defeat of Nazism.

Let me begin with words of Gratitude to those who have made today happen. First, I would like to recognize Michele Gold, the founder of Shoah Legacy Writers, for her fearless leadership on our behalf and her vision for bringing our voices out into the open. Next I would like to thank Eli Eldan for all he has done in leading our group at this time and for his heartfelt dedication to teaching about the Shoah at HMLA. Last I would like to heartily thank Michael Morgenstern, Jen Maxcy and the staff of HMLA who have hosted our work, supported us and allowed us to be here today. We are more than grateful.

In the description of today’s event, we wrote, “80 years after the end of the Shoah, the descendants of survivors address liberation and its subsequent impact on their families’ lives. The act of liberation was only the very beginning of a long process by which survivors began to reclaim their autonomy and reintegrate into society. Sometimes painfully, survivors made their way to new lands, reestablished goals for moving forward, and found love again. Out of intense desire to rebuild families and thereby claim some semblance of meaning in their new lives, the second generation was born. Perhaps no two generations in the Jewish people’s history were ever as tightly bound to one another as those of the survivors and their children. Those children, today, remember their parents’ liberation and its lasting meaning.”

It may be worth considering this last idea just a little deeper as Jewish thought takes the idea of “L’dor va-dor” to be central to our tradition. We are repeatedly reminded in Jewish literature to pass memory, tradition, the love of God, the love of the Land of Israel and torah from generation to generation. And to our people’s credit, it is amazing the extent to which it has been successful at doing this over the millennia. But witness the critical power of this concept at the most profound punctuation points in our timeline. Indeed, at the most important times, it was not just what was passed from generation to generation, but what was created anew at the hour of need.

When the Romans destroyed the Second Temple on the ninth of Av, AD 70, generation after generation of those practicing sacrifices, the Korbanot, came to a close and a new generation offering prayer in its place was born. They elevated that new idea to great levels of piety and learning in the years to come, ensuring the survival of our people. When the Jews of Spain went through the trauma of exile in 1492, an entirely new generation who knew Spain only as an idea of the Golden age it represented, was born. They elevated that idea to the great flowering of Sephardic culture and learning across the Mediterranean world in the years to come, that indeed still flourishes. Similarly, we members of the second generation after the Shoah were born among the ashes and the pain of the killing of one third of our people. We have inherited a heavy mantle to bear from our parents, for many of us can never put it down. What will our generation create anew in this time of need?

All of us speaking today are here to honor the memory of our parents’ and of what they went through. My own mother, Rosa Filler, later Schneider – what would she have thought of this day of remembering Liberation? Her liberation was the termination of her time in Soviet exile from home in southeastern Poland. Done were her childhood days of starvation, of freezing in Siberia, of wandering incessantly on the Soviet freight trains to outrun the Nazis. I think she would have difficulty imagining such a thing as today, as I think liberation for her represented moving to a time beyond suffering, beyond remembering the hate and reexperiencing it. My mom would not have wanted me to be here today or to have to talk about such things. Mom, I’m sorry! I tried for many years, but I could not hold it back anymore.

The late Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Lord Jonathan Sacks, remarked that much as the Ninth of Av resonated throughout Jewish History, the Tenth of Av, was really the day that we should remember, for on that day we began to rebuild ourselves as a people. In discussing Liberation After Liberation, we examine the effects of liberation on that day, on that day +1, and on that day + 80 years – today.