The eighth graders from St. Mary’s Catholic School in Rockville, Maryland, joined an auspicious list of participants at the Days of Remembrance Commemoration sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“I learned Holocaust history in the fifth grade,” said Mielcah Valderrama, one of the St. Mary’s students. “I always found it really moving that these people suffered a really gruesome death because of their religion. As Catholics I think we should be understanding of their experience. Catholics were not accepted in the past.”
Mielcah was part of about two dozen local Catholics gathered by The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington who solemnly read names on April 19 of some of the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust from 1933-1945. For her part in the commemoration in the museum’s Hall of Remembrance, Mielcah chose a list that included at least 11 members of the Bardet family, one as young as 4 months old.
Since 1982, the museum has organized the national Days of Remembrance ceremony, held this year on April 20 at the U.S. Capitol. The reading of names at the Hall of Remembrance of the Holocaust Museum is open to individuals and groups. This year’s recitation of names was the first since 2019, after the museum closed or curtailed activities due to the pandemic.
For Father Pawel Sass, the pastor of Nativity Parish in Washington, D.C., choosing a segment of names to read had personal connections that the others in the archdiocesan group lacked. His grandmother was imprisoned at Sobibor, an extermination camp operated by Nazi Germany in her native Poland. She escaped, along with about 300 others, in October 1943. She was one of about 50 of those to survive to the end of the war, Father Sass said. After the escape, the camp was closed and dismantled.
“Family members told me about it. She didn’t talk about it,” he said, explaining that he only heard this part of his family’s history when he was in high school. His great-grandfather was a rabbi, he learned, his great-grandmother was Christian.
“I always wondered why we had lots of Jewish arts and crafts at home (in his Catholic household in Poland),” he said. Hearing his grandmother’s story explained that puzzle.
His grandmother might have escaped imprisonment because of her mother’s religion, but she came to the attention of the Nazis for giving food to a Russian prisoner of war, Father Sass learned. Her penalty was to be sent to Sobibor, where being murdered was almost inevitable. Instead, she managed to flee in an uprising by prisoners, hiding in a cabbage field until she could get away.
Father Sass moved to the United States from Poland in 2002. He said he has frequently been to the Holocaust Museum, as well as having visited the Sobibor Museum, Auschwitz and all the sites of Nazi camps in Eastern Europe. But this day’s reading of names was his first chance to do that, he said.
Others at the museum on April 19 included Washington Auxiliary Bishop Roy Campbell Jr., archdiocesan employees from several offices, and Father Walter F. Kedjierski, executive director of the Secretariat of Ecumenical and Religious Affairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Bishop Campbell told the Catholic Standard he also was struck by how many names he read were from the same family. “Whole families were murdered, but (in that case) not all at once. There was a year or two gap between some of their dates of death.”
The experience of reading names reinforced his understanding that “I don’t think the Nazis saw these people as people. If they did, how could you do that? It shows how wicked people can be, man’s inhumanity to man.”
Bishop Campbell said he values the education offered by the Holocaust Museum, because “we have not learned our lesson. You can see that in the history of our own country.” He cited the history in the United States of people being judged for and mistreated because of their skin color, country of origin, language and other characteristics. He also said he fears that the world could let atrocities on the scale of the Holocaust happen again.
“If people thought they could do this and get away with it, some people would do it again,” he mused. “I would like to think they wouldn’t, but look at Russia and Ukraine,“ he said, leaving the thought unfinished.
As part of the group, Martha Barreneche and Manuel Dezo were at the Holocaust Museum for the first time, having arrived in Washington a few months earlier from Rome. The two Argentinians had lived in Italy for five years as part of their work with Scholas Occurrentes, an organization founded by Pope Francis when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, which works to bring young people from around the world together in a “culture of encounter.”
Barreneche and Dezo noted that Argentina became home to many Europeans who fled Nazi rule and the Holocaust. It is home to the largest Jewish community in South America. The Scholas team said the Catholic Church in Argentina has had a strong relationship with the country’s Jewish community.
They said attacks on Jewish people are a vivid part of their own country’s history, after the 1990s brought two terrorist bombings to Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires. A Jewish community center was attacked with a car bomb in 1994, killing 85 and injuring more than 300. Two years earlier a bomb at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29.
After their turns at the podium, Barreneche said participating in the ritual of reading of names “is important because we have this kind of record to remind us not to repeat it.”
Dezo agreed, saying, “This is the way to look to the future.”
Groups and individuals are welcome to participate in reading names of Holocaust victims during the museum’s Days of Remembrance each spring and each Jan. 27, for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Faith-based groups such as Catholic parishes or schools should contact Rebecca Carter-Chand, director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, rcarter-chand@ushmm.org, to inquire about next year’s events.
