Holocaust Remembrance Week: A call to community action Published April 10, 2013 By Capt. Allen Abrams and Tech. Sgt. Amber Martin FAIRCHILD AIR FORCE BASE Wash.- -- At first glance, it's hard to see where Holocaust Remembrance Week fits into such a busy month at Fairchild Air Force Base. April is already jam-packed with awareness and remembrance. It's the Month of the Military Child, National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, National Alcohol Awareness Month and National Child Abuse Prevention Month, just to name a few. All of these focuses resonate in our daily personal lives. We can look around and see the damage caused by alcohol abuse and domestic violence and awareness towards sexual assault has never been higher in the Air Force. Our base has offices dedicated to each of the above mentioned remembrances except Holocaust Remembrance. We don't have constant reminders of the Holocaust or its effects and yet, Holocaust Remembrance gets just one week on the calendar, April 7 to April 14. It calls us to reflect upon a completed act: a nation-directed campaign of discrimination and genocide that, perhaps most notably, culminated in the death of over 6 million Jews from across Europe. The memory grows less visceral with the passing of Holocaust survivors each year. However, when we take a step back and look at the Holocaust as more than just a number of deceased--and when we view the Holocaust in the context of the Department of Defense's campaign this year--we can see where we can have an impact. Holocaust Remembrance Week is not a call to review a fading memory; it's a call to action. This year, we remember the Holocaust with an eye towards "Never Again: Heeding the Warning Signs." This theme reminds us that the Holocaust didn't begin with forcing Jews to wear stars on their clothing or concentration camps like Auschwitz and Dachau. It progressed over the course of more than a decade through a political party within Germany's democratic republic and wrestled a foothold through the rule of law. The Holocaust rests in a gruesome intersection of fear, violence, and communities turning upon themselves. The famous poem from the pastor Martin Niemoeller captured it succinctly: "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist..." and on and on it went, until "they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." The signs were there before the Holocaust became the Holocaust. Limited rights here, book-burnings there. Discrimination everywhere, creeping onward and rooted in German law. It's that failure of the collective Germany--and the world--that distinguishes this week from the other awareness events this month. Rather than looking under our own personal rooftops, Holocaust Remembrance Week calls us to vigilance as a community. It calls us to look beyond ourselves and beyond the April 14 end to this remembrance week. In a world where hatred still abounds, it calls us to do right by our neighbors and as a nation because if we don't, then who will?