Every January for the past five years, San Jose City Councilmember David Cohen’s office has hosted a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at City Hall. But this year’s observance Monday, Cohen said, felt more relevant than ever.
“Remembering the lessons of the Holocaust seems as important as ever in the times we find ourselves,” said Cohen, who was joined in sponsoring the event by Councilmember Michael Mulcahy. “It is particularly discouraging that this event seems more poignant than ever because of a surging escalation in antisemitism even in our own community.”
That surge included an incident in December in which eight students formed a “human swastika” on the football field of Branham High School in San Jose. One of the speakers Monday was Branham High senior Cormac Nolan, a member of the B’nai B’rith youth service organization who reached out to Cohen’s office after the Branham event. He shared a moving letter letter he had written to his future self about his 2024 visit to the Auschwitz concentration camps.
“I wanted to preserve the feelings that I felt because I know that when I have children and grandchildren, I want them to know how I felt even 80 years after what had happened,” Nolan said.
Those memories are still very clear to two Holocaust survivors who addressed the gathering of about 50 people in the City Hall Plaza. Alex Tsetlin, a San Jose resident who immigrated to the United States in 1979, was born in the Soviet Union and survived the Siege of Leningrad. Michael Zamczyk, who lives in San Carlos, was born in 1935 in Krakow, Poland, and was smuggled into Germany by his mother who pretended they were both ethnic Germans. He said his father, an attorney, was murdered at Auschwitz six weeks before it was liberated, according to German records.
“I had the luck of being born into a highly assimilated and educated family in Krakow and had a mother who was determined to save the children,” said Zamczyk, who was 4 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started World War II. The family moved to what became the Krakow ghetto, and Zamczyk and other children would find ways to get out under the ghetto walls and smuggle food back to their families.
Another speaker, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, spoke about his father’s family experience during the Holocaust when they were imprisoned at the Bergen-Belson concentration camp — the same one where Anne Frank died shortly before liberation. He also talked about the rise of antisemitism that he’s seen since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel in 2023, even in Santa Clara County. “It makes me think I’m going do everything I can to fight for this country and to fight for the rights of Jewish people to live freely and openly in this country,” he said.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Susan Ellenberg echoed those sentiments, noting the importance of helping ensure that those Holocaust survivors who live in our area are taken care of. Ellenberg presented a commendation to Susan Frazer, the CEO of Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley. That group, along with another nonprofit, Jewish Silicon Valley, are partnering on Operation Dignity, a campaign this month to supporting the emergency needs of Holocaust survivors. The campaign aims to raise $110,000, which will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Joseph Gringlas KAVOD SHEF National Fund.
Ellenberg noted that this history matters today since hate often begins not with violence but with language that divides and moments that make people feel more comfortable to look away than to speak up. “Fascism does not arrive overnight,” she said. “It takes hold when you treat the dehumanization of others as someone else’s issue.”
Cohen, who will be introducing a proclamation declaring Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in San Jose at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, also drew parallels between the conditions that led to the Holocaust and today’s political climate.
“A few years ago, the theme of this event was recognizing or remembering the righteous in Europe who protected children,” Cohen said. “I was eerily reminded of that this weekend, reading stories about families in Minnesota who are hiding children from our government right now. So we certainly still have a lot to learn.”
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