WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 24, 2017) — House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) released the following statement on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 

“Today marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, as all the world recalls the terrible events of the Twentieth Century when Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews. 

“From those ashes, and from the unstoppable determination of a great people, the State of Israel was born, and since that time no country has been a closer ally or greater friend to the United States.

“We mark this day as a special anniversary: it’s not of the first Jews forced out of their jobs by a German law, or of the first Jews transported into resettlement camps, or of the outbreak of WWII, or of the first death camps being built. All those were milestones, but Holocaust Remembrance Day marks a different anniversary.

“It commemorates the day when Jews fought back. In the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Polish Jews refused to surrender meekly to German officers and be shipped to their certain deaths. They fought impossible odds against the Wehrmacht, to live if only for a short time as free men and women. This is the lesson I teach my children — that the fight for human dignity cannot be extinguished by any government decree or acts of brutality.

“We remember this lesson every time we see an Israeli flag flying proudly above a free nation. We remember and pledge the Holocaust must never again happen.”