Israelis Pay Tribute to Holocaust Victims

The wail of sirens brought Israel to a standstill for two minutes Thursday in tribute to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and the survivors who helped build the Jewish state 50 years ago.

Traffic stopped, motorists stood by their cars, and pedestrians froze in their tracks as the sirens sounded at 10 a.m. on Holocaust Memorial Day to mourn the victims of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

At the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led 7,000 young Jews and 1,000 Holocaust survivors into the heart of darkness on a grim “March of the Living.”

“More than half a century has passed and still we hear the last cries and final prayers . . . of our brothers and sisters, our flesh and blood,” he said in a speech delivered near the ruins of Birkenau’s gas chambers and crematories.

The Nazis murdered up to 1.5 million people--the vast majority Jews--at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Netanyahu said the Holocaust could have been prevented if Israel, which will turn 50 in May, had been founded earlier.

“A Jewish state would have made it impossible to kill millions of Jews, indeed to kill any Jews with impunity,” he said.

But the echoes of anti-Semitism could still be heard: In Greece, makeshift gas canister bombs exploded at the office of the Athens Jewish Council, causing damage but no casualties.

Berlin, once the hub of Jewish life in Germany, marked the remembrance day by reading aloud the names of its 55,000 Jewish victims of the Nazis.

At Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and in parliament, Israelis read the names of relatives slaughtered by the Nazis.

Flags throughout Israel flew at half-staff, and restaurants and all places of entertainment were closed.

But in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War, Palestinians went about their business, pausing only to watch Israeli police officers who stood with their heads bowed while the sirens wailed.