GW commemorated the 11 million men, women and children killed in the Holocaust during Yom Hashoah, the day of Holocaust remembrance, this week.

GW Hillel, the Program Board, the Diversity Program Clearinghouse and other campus groups sponsored several events throughout the week, highlighting various aspects of the Holocaust, World War II and the current state of Neo-Nazism.

A panel of Holocaust survivors convened at Hillel Monday night to tell their personal stories of survival. GW professors Gideon Frieder and Tom Buergenthal, and Manya Friedman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shared memories of their lives during the war in Europe.

“Don’t be sad if you find you can’t understand the horror of what actually happened to us,” Friedman said. “Almost 60 years later, I find that I still can’t understand it.”

The panel took questions from the audience of students and faculty members on topics ranging from how their experiences affected their belief in God to how they viewed comparisons between the Holocaust and Kosovo.

Students read the names of children killed in the Holocaust Tuesday on the Marvin Center terrace, commemorating the short lives of the almost 2 million murdered. Readers spent 10 hours carefully reciting the list, announcing each child’s name and age.

Israeli journalist Yaron Svoray spoke to an audience in the Marvin Center ballroom Tuesday night about his 11-month infiltration of the German Neo-Nazi movement six years ago (see related story, p. 1). Posing as a fellow Neo-Nazi, he gained access to the secret rites of a growing faction within the country.

Wednesday night, Hillel presented “In Their Own Hands,” a documentary about the activities of the Jewish Brigade in the British army.