Yizkor · יִזְכֹּר · Remember

Remembering the Shoah

Six candles for the six million. This page honours the Jewish men, women and children murdered in the Holocaust, and the 26 people on Jews Impact whose lives tell its story: those we lost, those who fought and rescued, and the survivors who rebuilt the world and still inspire generation after generation.

To remember is the first act of justice. To live fully, to build, to teach and to love, is the answer the survivors gave the world.

What we remember

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators carried out the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews. Hebrew calls it the Shoah, “the catastrophe.” Whole communities that had lived in Europe for centuries were destroyed, among them as many as one and a half million children.

Behind the number are people: a doctor who would not leave the orphans in his care, a girl who wrote in her diary that she still believed in the goodness of people, a historian who buried an archive so the truth would survive him. Each of them had a name. Remembering them one by one is how we refuse to let their lives be reduced to a statistic.

Courage, resistance and rescue

Even in the darkest places, people chose courage. Young fighters rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Partisans in the forests of Belarus and Lithuania sheltered families and fought back. Prisoners smuggled gunpowder in Auschwitz, escaped to warn the world, and kept diaries, poems and songs alive. Others, Jews and non-Jews, forged papers, bribed officials and carried children across borders. Their stories show that dignity and solidarity could survive even there.

How the Jewish people pushed on

The survivors could have been forgiven for giving up on the world. Instead, many of them rebuilt it. They married and raised families, founded schools and synagogues, and rebuilt communities in Israel, the Americas and Europe. Among them were future Nobel laureates, the founders of great companies, judges, doctors, psychologists, teachers, athletes and artists. Elie Wiesel turned his testimony into a lifelong campaign against indifference. Viktor Frankl taught millions how to find meaning in suffering. Edith Eger, forced to dance at Auschwitz, spent her life helping others heal from trauma.

Their children and grandchildren carry the story forward. That continuity, life chosen again and again after so much death, is itself one of the most powerful answers to the Shoah.

Justice and memory

Out of the catastrophe came new ideas that protect people everywhere. Raphael Lemkin coined the word “genocide” and campaigned until it became a crime under international law. Hersch Lauterpacht helped put the rights of the individual at the centre of international law. At Nuremberg, Benjamin Ferencz, at 27, prosecuted the leaders of the killing squads, and spent the rest of his life working for a world court. Testimony recorded by survivors and preserved by archives and museums now teaches tolerance in classrooms around the world.

Six candles

On Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, survivors light six torches at the national ceremony at Yad Vashem, one for each million of the Jews who were murdered. Families light memorial candles at home, and in many communities the names of the victims are read aloud. The candles at the top of this page are always lit, for them, and for everyone you are remembering as you read.

How you can remember

Read more about how Jewish tradition honours the dead on our In Loving Memory page, and about the idea of repairing the world, tikkun olam.

Remembered

Lives cut short, whose words, care and courage still speak.

5 lives
Anne Frank Anne Frank 1929–1945 Diarist of the Holocaust; her diary has become one of literature's most-read accounts of conscience and hope. Janusz Korczak Janusz Korczak c. 1878–1942 Warsaw paediatrician, author and orphanage director who championed children’s rights, then refused rescue and went with his orphans to Treblinka in August 1942. Haviva Reik Haviva Reik 1914–1944 Slovak-born kibbutz pioneer and Palmach parachutist who flew into Nazi-threatened Slovakia in 1944 to feed and rescue Jewish refugees, and was murdered by the SS at 30. Gisi Fleischmann Gisi Fleischmann 1892–1944 Bratislava Zionist leader who headed the clandestine Working Group, bargaining, bribing and smuggling to save Slovak and Polish Jews, and refused to flee until she was deported to Auschwitz. Mala Zimetbaum Mala Zimetbaum 1918–1944 Antwerp Jewish woman who used her post as an interpreter in Auschwitz-Birkenau to save fellow prisoners, then became the first woman to escape the camp, defiant to the very end.

Courage under fire

Fighters, partisans and witnesses who refused to be silent.

2 lives
Tuvia Bielski Tuvia Bielski 1906–1987 Village miller’s son who led the Bielski partisans in the forests of Belarus, turning a band of fugitives into a refuge that saved about 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust. Rudolf Vrba Rudolf Vrba 1924–2006 Slovak Jew who escaped Auschwitz in April 1944 and co-wrote the Vrba–Wetzler report, the first detailed eyewitness account of the camp’s gas chambers to reach the free world.

Those who rescued

People who saved children, families and strangers, often at great risk.

6 lives
Henrietta Szold Henrietta Szold 1860–1945 Founder of Hadassah; through Youth Aliyah, rescued thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Europe. Recha Freier Recha Freier 1892–1984 Berlin rabbi’s wife who conceived Youth Aliyah, sending Jewish teenagers from Nazi Germany to Palestine, and fought for decades to be credited as its founder. RS Recha Sternbuch 1905–1971 Orthodox Jewish rescuer in Switzerland who smuggled refugees across borders, ran secret aid networks and helped free 1,200 Jews from Theresienstadt in 1945. George Mantello George Mantello 1901–1992 Transylvanian Jewish businessman who, as a Salvadoran diplomat in Geneva, issued protective citizenship papers to Jews and broke the news of Auschwitz to the Swiss public in 1944. Nicholas Winton Nicholas Winton 1909–2015 London stockbroker who in 1939 organised the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, and kept quiet about it for almost fifty years. Ruth Gruber Ruth Gruber 1911–2016 Journalist and photographer who escorted nearly 1,000 Holocaust refugees to America in 1944 and documented the Exodus 1947, Yemenite and Ethiopian Jewish rescues across six decades.

Survivors who rebuilt the world

They carried memory forward and gave the world books, discoveries, companies, healing and hope.

7 lives
Elie Wiesel Elie Wiesel 1928–2016 Holocaust survivor; author of "Night"; Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1986. Primo Levi Primo Levi 1919–1987 Turin chemist and Auschwitz survivor whose If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table and The Drowned and the Saved are among the most important writings on the Holocaust. Viktor Frankl Viktor Frankl 1905–1997 Viennese psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, arguing that the search for meaning is the deepest human drive, even in the camps. Imre Kertész Imre Kertész 1929–2016 Budapest-born survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald whose novel Fatelessness transformed Holocaust literature; in 2002 he became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Paul Celan Paul Celan 1920–1970 Holocaust survivor from Czernowitz whose German-language poems, above all “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), became the defining poetic witness to the destruction of European Jewry. Otto Frank Otto Frank 1889–1980 Anne Frank’s father, the only one of the eight people hidden in the Amsterdam annex to survive, who published her diary and spent his life spreading its message. Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman 1934–2024 Child survivor of Nazi-occupied France who, with Amos Tversky, mapped the systematic errors of human judgment, founded behavioural economics and won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.

Justice and memory

Those who named the crime, brought it to court and made sure the world would remember.

6 lives
Raphael Lemkin Raphael Lemkin 1900–1959 Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the word “genocide” in 1944 and campaigned almost single-handedly until the United Nations outlawed the crime in 1948. HL Hersch Lauterpacht 1897–1960 Galician-born Cambridge jurist who put the individual at the heart of international law, helped bring “crimes against humanity” to Nuremberg, and sat on the World Court. Benjamin Ferencz Benjamin Ferencz 1920–2023 At 27, in his first case, chief prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg; he spent the rest of his 103 years campaigning for an International Criminal Court. FB Fritz Bauer 1903–1968 Jewish judge, exile and Hesse attorney general who secretly tipped off Israel to Eichmann’s hiding place and forced West Germany to face Auschwitz in the Frankfurt trials of 1963–65. Vasily Grossman Vasily Grossman 1905–1964 Red Army correspondent who wrote one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp, then the novel Life and Fate, so dangerous to the Soviet state that the KGB “arrested” the manuscript. Steven Spielberg Steven Spielberg b. 1946 Filmmaker; defined modern blockbuster cinema and produced "Schindler's List." Founded the Shoah Foundation.

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