Chen-ou Liu's Translation Project: First English-Chinese Haiku and Tanka Blog

Friday, January 27, 2023

Holocaust Remembrance Day Tanka

This Brave New World, LXVII
written in response to this alarming news, NL Times, Jan. 25, 2023 : "23% of young Dutch have doubts that the Holocaust happened"

"I, too, find it shocking, ”Prime Minister Mark Rutte later said. “We can debate everything, but it is important that we at least agree on the facts.”

Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Netherlands residents born after 1980 think the Holocaust is “a myth” or that the number of Jewish people killed is grossly exaggerated. That is more than in other countries. One-third to over half of the generations born since 1980 know remarkably little about the persecution of the Jews and genocide in the Second World War.


in the chat room
did SIX million really die
loud and louder ...
more youth enter this guessing game
as the night grows dark and colder


FYI: Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last is a neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial pamphlet published in 1974 by neo-Nazi propagandist Ernst Zündel...In 1983, Holocaust survivor Sabina Citron began a private prosecution under s.181 of the Canadian Criminal Code against Zündel, charging him with spreading false news...The Supreme Court concluded in the 1988 trial that "The pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? does not fit with received views of reality because it is not part of reality." -- excerpted from the Wikipedia entry, "Did Six Million Really Die?"  

And for more about Holocaust Remembrance Day, see my "Special Feature" post, Poems For Reflections on the Day of Holocaust Remembrance