The Keizer Community Library is participating in the nationwide effort to honor victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution by presenting a Days of Remembrance display at the Library and the Keizer Cultural Center through early February, 2020.
The commemoration will include Holocaust victim and survivor profiles, educational posters, and a booklist and display of books about the Holocaust. The library is also displaying a series of World War I posters. The posters are gifts from the Smithsonian Institution of Traveling Exhibition Service and the National Museum of American History, a beyond-the-textbook look at the war and its aftermath.
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Although Jews were the primary victims, others among the six million people who were murdered included: Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) people with mental and physical disabilities; Poles who were targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons; homosexuals; Jehovah’s Witnesses; and Soviet prisoners of war. Political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi Germany.
Jan. 27, 2020, marks 75 years since Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. The largest of the concentration, labor, and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany, Auschwitz left a mark as one of the most notorious sites carrying out the Nazi mission to murder all of Europe’s Jews.
The Keizer Community Library, 980 Chemawa Road N.E., is open at the following times: Monday-Thursday, 1 to 7 p.m.; Friday, 1 to 4 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m.