65 Years June 6th, 1944-June 6th, 2009

In the middle of the night sixty-five years ago today, soldiers from the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the British 1st Airborne Division jumped out of their troop-carrier airplanes and parachuted into Normandy, France.

Hours later, one and a half million soldiers from the United States, Britain, England, and Canada stormed the beaches of Normandy, struggling onto the beaches amidst a hail of German gunfire. In seizing this mere 60 miles of beachhead, they began the great endeavor to liberate Europe from Nazi oppression.

Most people, unfortunately, do not remember why today is important, but for me today is especially important, because these heroic men (along with their then-comrades in the Soviet Red Army) saved many Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Poles, intellectuals, homosexuals, political prisoners, etc. from murder at the hands of the Nazis (even when millions of others had already been murdered). My grandparents were at Buchenwald when American soldiers, among them the president's uncle, liberated it.

In the end, the total monetary loss of World War II cannot be accurately estimated, but over 50 million people, civilians and soldiers, died in a war that never should have started--but did. All I ask is that today people remember that on this day and for nearly a year after it sixty-five years ago, thousands of those 50 million people died so that this world would remain untouched by further stomping under the heels of the Nazi jackboot. Because of the valor displayed by those soldiers, the Nazis are a few thousand crazed white-supremacists in a few underarmed and irrelevant militias, the Hebrew language is spoken by over thirteen million Jews today, and when newly inducted members of the Israel Defense Forces are sworn in at the ruins of Masada, they say this: never again. I add this: never forget.