A Painful and Still-Present Memory: Honoring the Lives of Holocaust Victims

Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin, and Sonoma Counties. It holds more than 13,000 books and several thousand documents, photographs, and artifacts in the Tauber Holocaust Library and Archives.

Jaivon Grant, California Black Media

For some, it may be hard to imagine barely escaping alive from one of the biggest mass genocides in world history, or hearing stories about family members who were the victims of a catastrophe

COMMENTARY: Bullets Not Firecrackers for the Lunar New Year

of that magnitude. But for Jewish Americans living in California that scenario is a painful and present truth that they live with, respectfully acknowledging and memorializing it every year.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD), commemorated yearly on Jan. 27, is a memorial day established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 to honor victims (and their families) who suffered from the German genocide that lasted more than a decade. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the day of commemoration was established for several purposes. Among them are serving as an official date to honor victims of the Nazi regime and promoting Holocaust education worldwide.

For Brandon Brooks, director of California Black Media’s Stop the Hate Project, it is critical for Californians — and all Americans — to recognize and uplift the experiences and perspectives of their neighbors from other ethnic groups. Funded by the California State Library, the Stop the Hate project aims to eradicate hate crimes and hate incidents in the state and promote intercultural understanding and cooperation.

By Emil Guillermo

In Lunar New Year-speak, the rabbit year is believed to portend peace and hope, not fear and dread.

But the sounds of the season aren’t firecrackers. Just bullets.

From Oakland to Half Moon Bay to Monterey Park in Southern California, it’s strange when American mass shootings take on the look of our country’s diversity.

That’s not a good look.

Just take this, unique period — from 10:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 21, to Monday night around 6 p.m. Jan. 23. In less than 48 hours, in the great diverse state of California, we saw mass gun violence that has claimed 19 lives.

The situation in Oakland has been somewhat pushed out of the national glare. But on Monday night, Oakland Police say eight people were shot on MacArthur Boulevard. Reports say those who were shot took themselves to local hospitals where one person died.

Shocking, but it almost seems common in America these days. It should never be an afterthought, but it is when two other mass shootings take place in that time period.

The first was Saturday night, when a shooter entered the Star ballroom in Monterey Park, opened fire and killed 11 people, wounding another nine. The shooter fled to Alhambra to the Lai Lai ballroom looking to do more, but was disarmed by a young man, Brandon Tsay, who is being called a hero.

The suspect fled, but the surprise came when Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert G. Luna announced who they were looking for.

“Our very preliminary description has been described as a male Asian,” Luna said.

A “male Asian?” You were expecting maybe a white supremacist?

Many, in fact, from the start were thinking hate crime since there’s been nearly 12,000 instances of hate transgressions against Asian Americans since the pandemic began.

That’s the type of perp I was expecting. Pardon me for stereotyping racist mass shooters.

I just didn’t expect “male Asian.”

By late Sunday, the suspect was identified as Huu Can Tran, 72.

Tran was found dead of a self-inflicted wound after he was pulled over on a traffic stop on Sunday mid-morning, said LA County Sheriff Robert Luna at a press conference.

And just as everyone was trying to process the grief and shock of Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay happened.

Suspected murderer Chunli Zhao appears to have driven to a Sheriff’s substation to turn himself in when he was called out of his car and wrestled to the ground.

Zhao is being held on suspicion of killing seven people around 2 p.m. Pacific time on Monday in two workplaces — mushroom farms — 30 miles south of San Francisco.

Overall, it leaves us with some staggering math. Seven dead, one wounded in Half Moon Bay.

Eleven dead and 9 wounded in Monterey Park to the south. Add the one death in the Oakland incident, and you have 19 people dead, 17 wounded in three mass shootings in California since Saturday night.

Zhao, 66, now joins the late Monterey Park suspect Tran, 72, onto an ignominious list cre- ated to accommodate an emerging Asian male stereotype, a different kind of OG — older gunman, suspected mass murderer.

Officials said Zhao is believed to have acted alone, using a semi-automatic weapon deputies found in his car. The Half Moon Bay victims were only identified as a mix of both Chinese and Hispanic farmworkers, who were Zhao’s coworkers.

It’s a part of the AAPI community you don’t often hear about: the Chinese immigrant ag workers in the Bay Area who live on the farms.

It’s also far from the suburban landscape of Monterey Park in Los Angeles County. But you don’t really hear much about them either.

This is part of our functional invisibility. Often, we deal in our own worlds apart from the mainstream. We deal with it, until it’s no longer functional. It wasn’t for Zhao and Tran. Something in their worlds wasn’t right. They turned to a gun for answers.

People notice us now. But it will pass. Until the next time, and the next time because we’ll have more AAPI shooters before any viable policy changes.

And as the shooters become more common, our assimilation into America’s gun narrative will be nearly complete.

AAPI will no longer have just the white supremacists and the anti-Asian haters to fear.

We’ll have more AAPIs like Zhao and Tran to deal with — and not just older men, but younger men and women, too — people who seek to deal with their private matters in a public way through gun culture and violence.

Tran’s saga ended with a self-inflicted wound. Zhou didn’t get that far. But maybe a lesson is to focus a bit more on the welfare and mental health of our people and not just on the control of the gun.

As Tran showed us, the gun was just the means to the ultimate cry for help.

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. He does a talk show on www.amok.com.

In Jewish communities, Jan. 27 is known as Yom HaShoah. Families and communities will often light Yahrzeit candles — Yahrzeit means anniversary (specifically related to someone’s death) — to honor those who were murdered in the Holocaust. The candle burns for 24 hours, and it is custom to light it at sundown on the day before Yom HaShoah. Occasionally, electric Yahrzeit candles are used as a substitute and are plugged into a wall in places like hospitals, for safety reasons.

In Los Angeles, at the Holocaust Museum LA, visitors can see firsthand artifacts that were personal items from survivors and other memorabilia. This museum, founded in 1961, is the oldest survivor-founded Holocaust exhibit in the United States that is solely focused on the impact of the mass genocide. The experience is free for students, and the museum offers tours, educational programs, and conversations with survivors meant to inspire critical thinking and show the Holocaust’s current social relevance.

Morgan Blum Schneider, Director of the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) Holocaust Center, says that she is dedicated to raising social awareness about Jewish history and inspiring social responsibility.

“The JFCS Holocaust Center was founded by Holocaust survivors through perseverance and determination to fight antisemitism. We continue to share their testimony with thousands of students each year,” said Schneider. “This week, in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and every week throughout the year, the JFCS Holocaust Center works in partnership with CA teachers to bring lessons of the Holocaust and genocide into classrooms throughout California to inspire social responsibility and moral courage in today’s youth.”

The JFCS Holocaust Center is a program of Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San

“For Black Americans, the way we identify with the horror stories of the Holocaust is immediate and deeply sympathetic. It is a recognition based, in part, on our own collective memory of slavery, exclusion and suffering because of who we are — not what we did — as a people,” he says. “The only way we, Americans from all backgrounds, can begin to do something about the division, misunderstanding and normalization of racial and ethnic hatred that we see trying to flourish in our society is to fight it by learning; push back on it by listening. Get to know about each other’s histories, celebrate each other’s traditions, embrace the things that unite us as Americans and take a hard, uncompromising stance against hatred in any form and the violence it triggers.”

Notably, the dedication to honoring IHRD extends incredibly far beyond California, where there are an estimated 1.19 million people of Jewish descent (about 3% of the state’s population), based on U.S. Census numbers compiled by World Population Review.

According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, 39 countries participated in IHRD commemorating ceremonies in 2015. Many of those countries hosted lectures, showed films, or lit candles while reading names of the victims. Additionally, many participating countries established their own remembrance days that linked to events caused by the Holocaust.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) — established in 1945 to promote international cooperation through education, science, and culture — has also fought to counter antisemitism and other forms of group-targeted violence.

“The Holocaust profoundly affected countries in which Nazi crimes were perpetrated, with universal implications and consequences in many other parts of the world,” reads the UNESCO site. “As genocide and atrocity crimes keep occurring across several regions, and as we are witnessing a global rise of antisemitism and hate speech, [sharing a collective responsibility] has never been so relevant.”

This California Black Media feature was supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library.