# Holocaust program focuses on Holocaust remembrance and empathy 

/ Published May 3, 2023
PHILADELPHIA, 
Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support held a Holocaust remembrance event on April 26 to honor the millions of people stripped of their human rights and killed during the events of World War II.

“[Americans] will face down the hate and the lies that carry in them the terrifying echoes of one of the worst chapters in human history,” President Joseph Biden explained in his statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “And for generations to come, we will continue to defend our foundational values as a nation—freedom, equality, and dignity for all human beings.”

DLA Troop Support Deputy Commander Kishayra Lambert began the program by emphasizing President Biden’s sentiments on preserving history.

“As time widens the divide between those heinous events and the present, our physical connections to the past dwindle in numbers,” she said. “So the need to acknowledge, preserve and honor the history and stories of the Holocaust becomes more and more imperative.”

Lambert further addressed the idea of empathy and the importance of recognizing that all humans are born free and equal, and a society’s job to recognize and stop hate, she said.

“Understand the evil that is possible when actions are fueled by hatred; when individuals are dehumanized based on their religion, race, creed or color; and when ordinary citizens decide to look away rather than speak out and take action,” Lambert cautioned.

While introducing the keynote speaker and Holocaust survivor Peter Stern, Lambert asked the audience to listen and learn from his family’s story. She also reminded attendees to be responsible citizens who protect human rights across continents, recognize when those rights are challenged, and take appropriate action.

“We must pass these stories and understandings on so our children and grandchildren can learn where those roads lead; so, they know when to speak up and that the commitment of ‘never again’ lives strongly in their hearts,” Lambert said.

Stern—who was five years old when the Holocaust began—took the podium, and spoke about how the genocide began with disinformation and hate speech that lent support to systemic injustices against unalienable human rights.

“The [Nazi Party] passed what are known as the Nuremberg Laws,” he said. “One of those laws said that all Jewish children born will have Jewish names such as Abraham, Moses.”

He explained that “all rights were suspended, you were no longer a citizen” and “if you were Jewish, you even lost the ability to make a livelihood.”

At that point, it was only a matter of time before he saw his family and friends placed into “cattle cars” and shipped to “[work at concentration] camps throughout central and Eastern Europe, usually to their death.”

Stern then stopped to ask the audience why “[Holocaust] survivors, come and talk? What do we want from you, the people who listen to this story?”

He then explained that the patterns of injustice he witnessed in Nazi Europe also existed in the United States through systemic legalized racial injustice.   

 “In many ways [it] was more disturbing than what had happened [during the Holocaust], witnessing “the way Black Americans were treated,” Stern said of his arrival to Florida for high school in the U.S. South, segregated by Jim Crow laws.

Stern ended his speech with a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King: “In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”

 “We want you to remember [that] if you have difficulty putting yourself into someone else’s shoes, it’s going to get harder,” Stern said. “We have to remember, contrary to what the Nazi’s said, we are all one people.”

The event was cohosted by Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support and NAVSUP Weapons Systems Support Equal Employment Opportunity Offices. For further information and a guide to remembering the victims of the Holocaust, DLA Distribution EEO created the Holocaust Days of Remembrance newsletter. The newsletter highlights interesting facts about the Holocaust, including the genocide of other populations — including Roma, Poles, Ukrainians, Soviet civilians, and prisoners of war, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Black Germans, disabled people, communists, and homosexuals.