November 9, 1938 – Germany The Nazis unleashed a night of terror against their Jewish citizens in a dramatic inception of the Holocaust. Hitler, emboldened by the fact that no one pressured him to stop, began implementing his notorious plan laid out in Mein Kampf – calling for the extermination of the Jewish race.

November 9, 2003 – United States - Approximately two hundred students, teachers, parents, and others rallied outside the house of Jakiw Palij today. Palij is a self admitted camp guard in the Trawniki death camp who assisted the Nazis in the Holocaust. In fact sixty years ago this week, the Trawniki guards participated in the murder of 6,000 Trawniki Jews on November 3rd and 4th, 1943 and the eventual liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto.

On July 31, 2003 – U.S. District Judge Allyne Ross stripped Palij of his citizenship on the grounds set forward by US Attorney Mauskopf who said that Palij “directly contributed to their (the Jews) eventual slaughter “. “The fact that Palij has lived as a free man as the United States for 50 years is an outrage”, said rally organizer Rabbi Zev Friedman, Dean of Rambam Mesivta. “We have a moral responsibility to remember the events of the recent past and speak out vociferously against the perpetrators. Imagine in 50 years from now we found one of Osama’s henchmen living freely in Queens, would we forgive and forget – should we?!”

With the commemoration of Kristalnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), and Veteran’s Day in two days, those gathered to rally expressed their outrage that a former Nazi guard has been living freely in the United States while many U.S. soldiers have died fighting the Nazi’s during World War Two. With Palij’s citizenship now stripped, they also called on the US Department of Justice to go forward with deportation hearings. Speeches were punctuated with chants of “God Bless America”, “Just Get Out”, “No S.S. in the U.S.”
When one of the reporters knocked and rang the doorbell of Palij’s house, the crowd chanted “Show your face”. When no response was forthcoming, students chanted “What a Coward.”

The rally sent a message to Palij and all perpetrators of evil, that their crimes will never forgotten or forgiven.