The 15th annual Holocaust Remembrance program was held on Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 11:30 am. The theme for this year's program is Rescuers.
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 We will be joined this year by Joseph Ichiuji, a Japanese-American war veteran who was interned at Poston War Relocation Center, an internment camp in Arizona for Americans of Japanese origin, for one year after having been drafted, but not allowed to serve. It was not until 1943 that he was allowed to join the U.S. Army. His 100/442nd Regimental Combat Team, an Army unit of Japanese-Americans, became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service due to their outstanding bravery and heavy combat duty they faced. There were over 18,000 individual decorations for bravery, 9,500 Purple Hearts, and seven Presidential Distinguished Unit Citations.At the dedication of the World War II Memorial in Washington, he “told of being among the first of the allied forces to liberate Jews from the camps of Dachau in April 1945. ‘When I saw the barbed wire it reminded me of the camp my family was in,’ he said, ‘and I wondered when they were going to free my family.’” (New York Times, 5/30/2004) Mr. Ichiuji lives in Rockville, Maryland. |
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  Majlinda Myrto is an Albanian-American Muslim, the daughter-in-law of rescuer Shyqyri Myrto. She will speak about how her late father-in-law and his family took in his friend Josef Jakoel and Josef's sister Keti in October 1943, shortly after Albania was occupied by the Germans, until its liberation in November 1944. Although it was no secret in the town of Kavaja that two of the “extended family members” living with the Myrtos were Jews, nobody betrayed them.Even when Shyqyri's brother Ramazan was arrested as not friendly to the occupiers, and sent to the Mauthausen camp in Austria, from which he never returned, the Jakoels were sheltered. Shyqyri Myrto and Josef Jakoel, school friends before the war, maintained the friendship even after Josef emigrated to Israel. In 1993, an American Jewish benefactor made it possible for a group of Righteous Albanians to visit Israel, where they were honored by Yad Vashem. Shyqyri and Josef were reunited one last time. |
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  His Excellency Robert Kupiecki, the newly arrived Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, will read a letter from Irena Sendler. This Polish gentile social worker smuggled approximately 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, and placed them with Polish families, in convents, or in orphanages. Because her goal was always to reunite the children with their families, she put information about each into glass jars which were buried in her garden. Her story was almost unknown until four high school girls from rural Kansas began researching some information about her in 1999 for a National History Day Project. Their research led to the Life in a Jar project.Ambassador Kupiecki was born in Warsaw in 1967. He holds a Ph.D. degree in political science, in addition to a number of other degrees, and specialises in international relations. Ambassador Kupiecki started to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1994. From 1999 to 2004, he was Deputy Ambassador of the Permanent Representation of the Republic of Poland to NATO and Western European Union (WEU) in Brussels. In 2004, he became Director of the Security Policy Department, until his current appointment. [Update, Monday, May 12, 2008] Irena Sendler died this morning, at age 98. More information is available at the MSNBC website, from which the above picture (Stefan Maszewski / AFP - Getty Images FILE, April 2007) was taken. Mrs. Sendler had been hospitalized with pneumonia for about a month. She is survived by a daughter and a granddaughter; and, in a very real way, by the 2,500 children she and her associates saved, and by their children and grandchildren. |
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 Derek McGinty, our moderator, is the weekday co-anchor for News Now on WUSA-TV, Channel 9 at 5:00 7:00 pm. The Washington, DC, native is perhaps best known for “The Derek McGinty Show” on WAMU from 1991 to 1998.He has been a reporter and anchor for WJLA, and spent two years at ABC News. His broadcasting experience includes both politics and sports; he has had articles published in The NY Times, NY Daily News, Washington Post, and Washingtonian Magazine. He received his bachelor's degree in communications from American University. |
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Sponsoring Agencies
The 25 Departments and other agencies listed here provide financial and logistical support for the Holocaust Remembrance program:
Joseph Ichiuji photo from Joseph Ichiuji Collection (AFC/2001/001/13535), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress; information paraphrased from several web sites. Information about Shyqyri Myrto is taken from an email from, and photos provided by, Majlinda Myrto. Information about Irena Sendler abstracted from the Life in a Jar site. Photo of Derek McGinty from RTDNA.org; information based on bio on WUSA website. Photo of Ambassador Kupiecki provided by the Polish Embassy; biographical information extracted from biography provided by the Embassy. Photos may have been cropped and resized from those provided.
The program cover at the top of the page is a reproduction of this year's poster, created by Media Fusion – Steve Schaeberle, Graphic Designer; Stacey Dapoz, Editor – NASA Headquarters, Communications Support Services Center. The program booklet (8 page PDF file, approximately 3MB) can be viewed or downloaded. The program without the cover (7 page PDF file, approximately 500KB) is also available, as is the cover as a JPG file (950KB).
Programs and other information from several previous years are available.
Disclaimer (the fine print): Although the Holocaust Remembrance program is sponsored, and funded, by the federal agencies listed above, the site itself has been privately created and funded to support the Interagency Organizing Committee. Since the site receives no funding from any government agency, and the site is not subject to review by any government agency, information provided on the site should not be considered as official.
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