Sixty years ago...

[Jessica]

I thought this column was well-written and sobering.

>
>
> washingtonpost.com
> Evil Too Great to Grasp -- or Remember
>
> By Richard Cohen
>
> Thursday, January 27, 2005; Page A19
>
>
> Not long ago, Prince Harry -- an accident away from the British throne
> -- showed up at a costume party dressed as a Nazi. We know this
> because someone took a picture that made it into the English tabloids
> -- a diversion for a day or two before the papers returned to more
> serious matters such as the sexual affairs of Cabinet ministers. But
> they should have stuck with the Harry story. The dim prince is truly a
> child of the new century. Nothing that happened in the past century
> seems to have affected him at all.
>
> Today is the 60th anniversary of the last century's most searing
> event, the liberation of Auschwitz. It was appropriately marked at the
> United Nations earlier in the week, but most people in most places
> took no heed, and even if they did, they may not have known what to
> make of it. I understand. The enormity of Auschwitz, let alone the
> Holocaust, is such that the human brain can scarcely contain it. Even
> to let Auschwitz in is to let God out.
>
> For some time now Auschwitz has been slipping away from us, officially
> remembered, unofficially neglected. Accounts of it -- books, films --
> are met with jaded boredom: We know, we know. In the infantile
> imagination of Harry, prince of the realm, the Nazi uniform summoned
> up not an ounce of revulsion, not a touch of the creeps, as if the
> Holocaust, like Vlad the Impaler, has been transformed from
> incomprehensible evil to comic book camp. It may be hard to deal with
> it any other way.
>
> Auschwitz is never far from my mind. I have been to the place and read
> its literature. But even if I hadn't, even if I knew it just as a
> place where more than 1 million Jews and others were murdered, it
> would still intrude at one of those treacly moments when someone
> mentions the goodness of mankind or the benevolence of God. It has
> been this way with me since childhood, when, over and over again, I
> asked the rabbis in religious school: Why? How? Explain! They could not.
>
> You saw some of this questioning in the aftermath of the recent
> catastrophic tsunami. Some writers tried to grapple with its
> theological implications: How could He? The children. The infants.
> What sort of God is this? But the questions will fade as the tragedy
> works its way toward the back of the newspaper and ultimately falls
> off the page. It will become something that just happened. Besides, it
> was impenetrably scientific, something geological, about volcanic
> pressures and tectonic plates -- and breathtakingly swift, to boot.
> Maybe God had just turned His back.
>
> The Holocaust, in contrast, was not an instantaneous event. It lasted
> years. It consumed about 6 million, 10 million, who knows how many
> million people, Jews and non-Jews, but 1 million Jewish children --
> infants, too. This had nothing to do with oceans and lava and tectonic
> plates and stuff only scientists could really understand. Auschwitz
> was the diligent work of man, a constellation of camps and factories,
> all of it worked by slaves, all of them marked for death. Auschwitz
> was essentially about murder, about what people did to people. A human
> being could go from physician or musician or mother or child to ash in
> the course of a couple of hours. Geology had nothing to do with it.
> The mysteries are not scientific. They are theological.
>
> Here is my fear. Because we cannot understand Auschwitz, because it is
> an immense bump in the road in our belief in a good God -- "a just
> God," the president said in his inaugural address -- we will let it
> slip from memory, remembered maybe like some statue in the town square
> that memorializes something or other, maybe a war, maybe a man.
> Reminders will seem like nagging, and when the survivors are finally
> gone (they have been an incredibly hardy lot) so, too, will be the
> obligation to remember. Ah, what a relief!
>
> Then, bit by bit, Auschwitz will fade, becoming something that
> happened in the last century to people who some may insist had it
> coming anyway -- Jews and commies and Gypsies and homosexuals . . .
> mostly. For most people, it may become -- it is already becoming --
> too dense a historic burden, a hideously heavy truth about who we can
> be, not just who we would like to be. Prince Harry just chucked it
> all. Someday, I fear, so shall we all and then -- as it has in Rwanda
> and at Srebrenica -- it will happen again.
>
> And again.
>
> cohenr@washpost.com
>
>
>
> © 2005 The Washington Post Company
>
>
>
>
>

[BarbaraL]

A thought-provoking article; thanks for sharing. Can't remember the exact quote, but it's something like: Those who disregard/ignore history are doomed to repeat it. What was Prince Harry thinking??? As part of the family ruling a nation that fought so valiantly against Hitler and the blitz, you'd think he'd have more sense.

[Jessica]

Yeah, I get the impression Harry isn't the sharpest tack in the royal corkboard.

[lindrusso]

Thanks Jessica.

One way to make sure it doesn't slip from our minds is to visit the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. Chuck and I went not too long after it opened and it was a profound and intense experience. They told us to allow 3-4 hours and after 6, we still had not covered it all.

The room that had the most impact on me was a room with a bridge. The floor below the bridge was littered with shoes in all sizes, including itty bitty little ones. When I stopped to think that these shoes were left behind by only a very, very small fraction of the victims, it really overwhelmed me - especially to see the shoes of infants and children. I don't know why that room had such an impact...

They end the tour with a room where they show videotaped interviews with holocaust survivors. It's a good way to end the tour - it gives you a few moments to stop and decompress before leaving this surreal (but horrible because it WAS real) world and entering the care-free hustle and bustle outside.

Alysha :)

[Julia1Pin]

I was wondering of anyone on the boards would comment this week.

When I was in Israel I went to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust museum) and it was the most moving thing I have ever done. Alysha, I got choked up by a display of shoes also. I was only 17 at the time, and it has stayed with me to this day.

About this new century, I don't think we can blame it on that. When Schindlers List came out there were cities where the youth went and laughed throughout the movie. It is the parents and communities fault for not teaching, not the time period in which we live.

Here's another interesting article:

We must rely on ourselves, says Sharon

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Thursday January 27, 2005
The Guardian

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, yesterday marked the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with a warning that the Holocaust had taught Jews that they can rely on no one but themselves for their survival.
Mr Sharon added that the world did not like the Jews fighting back, and when they did, it fuelled anti-semitism.

"The allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews. They knew and did nothing," he told the Israeli parliament yesterday.

"On April 19 1943, the Bermuda conference gathered, with the participation of representatives from Britain and the United States, in order to discuss saving the Jews of Europe.

"In fact, the participants did everything in their power to avoid dealing with the problem.

"When, in the summer of 1944, the mass deportations in Hungary were carried out, the allies did not bomb the train tracks which led to Auschwitz from Hungary, nor the murder facilities in Birkenau, and this was despite the fact that they had the ability to do so ... Thus were 618,000 Jews annihilated in a number of weeks, the Jews of Hungary."

As Holocaust survivors listened from the gallery, the Israeli prime minister said that, after 6 million murders, Jews had realised they could only rely on themselves for protection - a lesson that had been carried through to the present day.

"The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered ... This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us," he said.

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"The state of Israel learned this lesson and since its establishment, it has done its utmost to defend itself and its citizens, and provide a safe haven for any Jew, wherever he may be. We know that we can trust no one but ourselves." For this reason, Israel had to always remain strong, Mr Sharon said.

"We must always remember that this is the only place in the world in which we, the Jews, have the right and the power to defend ourselves with our own strength," he said.

"This we will never surrender."

Mr Sharon characterised the conflict with the Palestinians as part of the defence justified by the Holocaust. He then portrayed some critics of Israel's actions as anti-semites.

"This phenomenon, of Jews defending themselves and fighting back, is anathema in the side of the new anti-semites," he said.

"Legitimate steps of self-defence which Israel takes in its war against Palestinian terror - actions which any sovereign state is obligated to undertake to ensure the security of its citizens - are presented by those who hate Israel as aggressive, Nazi-like steps."

The parliament will itself be the scene of controversy next week: the German president, Horst Köhler, is scheduled to give a speech in his native tongue.

Some legislators and Holocaust survivors say it will be too painful to listen to him speaking in German and have threatened to boycott the session unless the German head of state switches to English.

[Jessica]

Originally posted by lindrusso


The room that had the most impact on me was a room with a bridge. The floor below the bridge was littered with shoes in all sizes, including itty bitty little ones. When I stopped to think that these shoes were left behind by only a very, very small fraction of the victims, it really overwhelmed me - especially to see the shoes of infants and children. I don't know why that room had such an impact...


I think it had more of an impact because you are a parent and because it is impossible to comprehend that someone would want to harm tiny children, particularly by the thousands. I went to Yad Vashem (the Israeli Holocaust memorial) years ago and one room has columns that represent the various countries, and they are higher or lower to represent the number of people who died from those places. There is one for children and it is topped with a tiny shoe; we were all in tears when we left that place.

[blazedog]

The Tolerance Museum in Los Angeles has an excellent and moving presentation. It's been awhile but as I recall you are given the identity card of a real survivor or victim and then at some point pass through to the (figuratively) to the showers or liberation at the end (if your person survived). They use animatronics to provide vignettes of what it was like from the beginning to the deportations --

One of the excellent aspects is that it embraces all of man's inhumanity and intolerance to other men and places the Holocaust in context with other genocides and non Jewish great leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Molli526]

We also have a very good Holocaust museum here in Michigan, in West Bloomfield. They moved it to a new building and the exterior is reminiscent of a concentration camp. I have always been very interested in the Holocaust as well as survivor stories. I have been taping the 3-part series on PBS (last week, last night and then conclusion next Wednesday).

It is amazing to me how horrid the Nazis were. It is hard for me to fathom how their brains worked in torturing innocent people, and then parts of the world ignoring it and pretending it wasn't happenind.

[jem927]

The musuem in DC is a wonderful memorial of the atrocities that happened during the war. I think everyone, especially the youth of today, who feel the WWII was "eons" ago, should be required to go. From what I have seen, WWII is sort of skimmed over in our schools today, and if that continues, then yes, I feel we are doomed to repeat history. They also have the ID cards that you pick up in the beginning of the tour - mine was a child who died of starvation.

I have also had the opportunity to visit a couple of the concentration camps in Germany, but never Auschwitz. The feeling of being there is quite undescribably. Dachau, which I have been to a couple of times, leaves me at a loss every time I visit. I don't know what it is, but when you walk in the gates, it is cold, like something is there, even during the warm days of summer. I don't believe in ghosts, but I swear there are still spirits there. Seeing the gas chambers and the ovens, just puts you in shock - how could someone do something as atrocious as that? And to think that the people in the little town either a) supposedly didn't know what was going on or b) knew whether it was "fresh" or "older" bodies being burned by the color of the smoke, but didn't do anything about it to this day sends a chill down my spine.

We have to remember these things, otherwise we are doomed to repeat it. And in some places I feel that we already are. :-(

Jamie

[MusicMom]

Thanks for sharing both articles- definitely food for thought. I took my father to the Holocaust Museum in DC several years ago, and remember being very moved by the train car and other artifacts. They certainly brought reality to all that I have read.

I agree that schools aren't spending enough time on the subject of the Holocaust and World War II. DS is in 10th grade and hasn't really studied it yet. Maybe they will in AP US History next year. We have talked about the Holocaust at home as teachable moments come up, especially with situations involving charismatic leaders and "mob psychology." There are many lessons to be learned from that period of human history.

[linsleyd]

Thanks for sharing both articles. I agree that the Holocast Mus. in DC is a worthwhile trip. Words can't describe the experience. I wish I had had a chance to visit a camp when I was an exchange student in Germany but my family really didn't want to discuss anything to do with WWII.

[hlao23]

This cartoon was in our paper not long ago. Thought it was interesting. Here's the link too: http://www.comics.com/editoons/lester/archive/lester-20050115.htmlhttp://www.comics.com/editoons/lester/archive/images/lester20050112205415.gif

[eas11]

Originally posted by MusicMom

I agree that schools aren't spending enough time on the subject of the Holocaust and World War II. DS is in 10th grade and hasn't really studied it yet. Maybe they will in AP US History next year. We have talked about the Holocaust at home as teachable moments come up, especially with situations involving charismatic leaders and "mob psychology." There are many lessons to be learned from that period of human history.

So true. A wonderful resource is Facing History and Ourselves (http://www.facinghistory.org/facing/fhao2.nsf/all/home?opendocument) Although my son's HS did not use there curriculum, I've used some of their resources at home and for study groups. HERE (http://www.facinghistorycampus.org/Campus/studyguides.nsf/CMRB/a74bc02aec0b75b485256dc8005ae88f?OpenDocument) is their (huge) downloadable ( or 25.00 purchase) resourse book for teens on the Holocaust.

About them:
Facing History & Ourselves offers teachers and others in the community occasions to study the past, explore new ideas and approaches, and develop practical models for civic engagement that link history to the challenges of an increasingly interconnected world and the choices that young people make daily. Facing History students learn that apathy and indifference stifle hope. They discover how violence destroys families and nations. They seek opportunities to confront the isolation that fuels the misunderstandings, myths, and misinformation they have about the “other.” Facing History helps students find answers to their questions. How can we prevent violence and end racism and antisemitism? How do we find the courage to protect human rights so that “never again” truly means that we have learned something by studying the events that led to one of the most violent times in the 20th century?

[rosie_one]

oo.. that cartoon is close to home isn't it?

I had the benefit of visiting the Auschwitz site as a teenager. I've never forgotten it, it was such an emotional experience. It's hard not to cry when I recall it with any clarity. One of the things that stuck with me as being very positive is that German teenagers are not allowed to graduate from school without a visit to one of the concentration camps.