SENATE RESOLUTION 16

(By Senators Beach, Baldwin, Hardesty, Jeffries, Palumbo, Plymale, Prezioso, Romano, Stollings, Woelfel, Rucker, and Weld)

[Introduced January 24, 2020]

Recognizing the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the creation of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Whereas, Under the German occupation of Poland, Auschwitz operated as a concentration camp from May 20, 1940, until January 27, 1945, during WWII; and

Whereas, 1.3 million people were imprisoned at Auschwitz and 1.1 million died there, including: 960,000 Jewish deaths; 74,000 ethnic Poles; 21,000 Roma and Sinti; 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war; and 10,000-15,000 other Europeans; and

Whereas, Auschwitz was considered a major site for the “Jewish question.” One in six Jews killed during the Holocaust died in Auschwitz; and

Whereas, The personal memoirs of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski chronicle the brutality of starvation, beatings, exhaustive forced labor, and disease from grotesque living conditions; and

Whereas, Torture and medical experimentation was performed on prisoners; and

Whereas, Genocide occurred on a massive scale; prisoners arrived in overflowing cattle trains; Nazis selected the strong for forced labor; the elderly, women, children, and babies were extinguished in gas chambers immediately upon arrival; and

Whereas, The Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz death camp on January 27, 1945, however, victory over Germany was its chief aim, not liberation of an oppressed people. It was the arrival of Western Allied troops in April 1945 that documented the death camp atrocities; and

Whereas, Dwight Eisenhower famously exclaimed, “Get it all on record now. . . get the films. . . get the witnesses. . . because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”; and

Whereas, German chancellor Helmut Kohl stated in 1989, “The darkest and most awful chapter in German history was written at Auschwitz.”; and

Whereas, The United Nations designated the liberation of Auschwitz as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember six million Jewish victims and millions of other victims of Nazism; and

Whereas, Remembrance develops understanding to help prevent future genocides; therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate:

That the Senate hereby recognizes the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the creation of International Holocaust Remembrance Day; and, be it

Further Resolved, That the Clerk is hereby directed to forward a copy of this resolution the West Virginia Holocaust Commission.