There isn’t much new to say about the Holocaust. We can’t change what happened over 70 years ago, though our perspectives do change as we grow from child to adolescent to adult. I’ve noticed that the world’s perspective seems to change too. Things that may have been taboo 20 or 30 years ago are now mainstream and acceptable. Not only is it acceptable for mainstream media, American universities, and your Average Joe and Jane to accept evil as righteous – we are living in a time when actual revision of human history is acceptable! How much more so have things changed since the second World War and the Holocaust?
I’ll never forget what happened when I spoke up about the Holocaust in my 4th grade public school class in Southern California. My teacher took me aside after class and told me not to ever talk about it ever again. He was a great teacher, but he didn’t want me talking about Jews and the Holocaust in his classroom. I was made to feel like a dirty Jew in 1980-something and I was reprimanded for it.
I remember feeling sure that my teacher was telling me that the Holocaust didn’t ever happen and that’s what I ran home to tell my parents. I can’t quote my 4th grade teacher, word for word over 30 years later but it sure felt bad and I will never forget. I never talked about the Holocaust again at that school.
In 11th grade, in Israel, we spent days on Kibbutz Kfar Vitkin where we learned first hand about what really happened before and during World War 2 from Holocaust Survivors. We traveled the journeys of Jewish Survivors through the stories of elderly men and women. We wept and we bonded over the horrors and via the courage of the few who managed to escape the bullets, the torture, and the gas chambers. We heard the story of a young mother forced to bind her breasts and watch her newborn baby starve to death.
She sat on a chair mere breaths away from us and told us her story. A malnourished and naked young woman gave birth alone, without her husband or her mother, or even a midwife, on a bare cot. She was never allowed to hold her baby and the infant’s cries grew weaker and weaker until her precious firstborn no longer moved nor breathed.
Hearing the vivid details and imagining what it was like to give birth under such hopeless circumstances and knowing your baby is slowly dying, is possibly the worst nightmare for any parent. Yet, there she sat on a chair in front of us and told us her inconceivable story. We heard about men, women, and children beaten and killed for being Jews in the wrong decade and country. No details were withheld from our inquiring minds. I remember feeling overwhelming emotions of sadness and horror, hope and privilege. How lucky are we to live in the same world a mere few generations later?
As Jews, we talk and think and relate to the Holocaust differently at different stages of our lives. The thousands of Jewish Survivors who miraculously lived through starvation, abuse, and horror were also the same people who rebuilt their lives from nothing, in foreign countries where Jews were not exactly welcomed with open arms. They learned new languages and cultures and tried their best to blend in and assimilate into society. The survivors married or remarried and had children. They raised the next generation to be strong, educated, and wealthy. Perhaps the Jewish People are hated for that – for rising from the death camps and becoming some of the world’s most successful people. Each and every year, we remember. We vow, NEVER AGAIN! We teach our children. We watch the sad movies and we attend the ceremonies. Each year there are less Survivors. As our Holocaust Survivors age and die, the next generation won’t be privileged to know them. The stories and memories of the Jewish people who once lived through the most atrocious genocide of all time will only be available in books, sad movies and documentaries.
Every year, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we lower our gaze and bow our heads as we light candles. In Israel, we stand still as the siren moans in honor and remembrance of the 6 million who were murdered and we all say, “NEVER AGAIN!” Some of us will say a prayer and try to memorialize the existence of the millions of Jewish souls that Hitler and the Nazis tried to erase from existence. Here, in Israel, it’s a national Memorial Day and the Holocaust is taught and discussed in every public school classroom, place of business, and home. Places of public entertainment close, flags on public buildings are lowered to half mast, and Holocaust documentaries and movies are shown on television while sad songs play on the radio. Across Israel we unite in a moment of thought or prayer to honor and respect the millions of people who were murdered at the hands of Hitler and his Nazi empire.
We say, NEVER FORGET but, obviously that’s a lie.
“Hitler” has become a flippant insult used against Jewish Israeli leaders. The IDF is accused of being an army of “Nazis”. President Trump is accused of being a “modern-day Hitler” while the world, again, remains silent.
White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that “even Hitler” wasn’t as bad as Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and we are all outraged. How dare he? Enemies of the Jewish State are outraged too – but why? Is the irony lost on the foolish anti-Israel camp – too occupied with hating Zionists and denying Israel’s right to exist? How are you better than Sean Spicer; an ignorant man who will pay dearly for his lack of sensitivity and knowledge?
Israel is the homeland of the Jewish People and we were barely “allowed” to return to our indigenous land after SIX MILLION Jews were senselessly and brutally slaughtered over years of suffering while the world watched silently and did NOTHING!
It’s not taboo to participate and support hateful rallies against Israel on university campuses across America. It’s not offensive to call the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel (a Jew) Hitler. Will you join the echoes of silence as Islamic terrorists seek to finish the work of Adolf Hitler?
What will be said when the same terrorists, stabbing, car-ramming, shooting, and bombing come for your loved ones? Never forget? Sometimes it feels as if the world already has.
