Never Again!

        By Hank Silverberg

  “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it"                                                             -- George Santayana                                                

          It is a startling figure. Twenty-two percent of millennials, and 11 percent of all American adults aren’t sure they know anything about the Holocaust which killed nearly 17 million people in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The figures come from a study released on Holocaust Remembrance Day this past week by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany. www.claimscon.org

        Two thirds of the millennials asked also could not identify what Auschwitz was.  And of those who did know something about the mass executions by the Nazis and their collaborators, 58 percent believed something like it could happen again.                                            

(The entrance to Auschwitz)

     The exact number of people who were murdered between 1933 and 1945 will never be fully known, but 17 million is the most used number. Six million of them were Jews. History often buries those figures in the overall death toll for the World War Two era, which could be as high as 50 million people. But the 17 million killed by systematic and documented mass murder cannot be brushed aside as just the consequences of world war.

          This new study comes out at the same time the United States is experiencing a rise in xenophobia about immigrants and an increase in anti-Semitism. A report released this past February from the Anti-Defamation League showed a rise of nearly 60 percent of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. It's the largest spike since 1979.

https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/2017-audit-of-anti-semitic-incidents

      And all this comes in a year when some of the leadership in our country, including the President, treat Nazis, skinheads, white nationalists and the KKK simply as another special interest group. Instead, these demons need to be condemned, scorned and relegated to the fringes of society where they can do no harm. The Republican party barely blinked when an avowed Nazi named Arthur Jones, with a long history of Anti-Semitism, openly maneuvered his way onto the ballot and won the GOP nomination for Congress for the third district in Illinois. He ran unopposed and got 20,000 votes in the primary.

     The solutions to hate, racism and prejudice are not simple. But we need to upgrade an education system to treat the Holocaust for what it was-- organized mass murder in unprecedented proportions against minority groups based on racism and prejudice of an uneducated populace. It was NOT just part of World War Two.   

    No school trip to our nation’s capital should be complete without a visit to The United States Holocaust Museum https://www.ushmm.org  and every high school level American History class should include a specific lesson on the Holocaust.  

 

(Courtesy USHMM) 

  Finally, we must continue to focus on the stories of Holocaust survivors while they are still alive, and stories already recorded by the Shoah Foundation http://sfi.usc.edu so that we don’t forget. I have provided some links here, including one I found through twitter this week:  @Stephenablack who relays his father's story.

    As I wrote about the confederate monuments and flag a few weeks ago, we have seen how quickly history can be rewritten to whitewash horror and distort the truth.
https://hanksilverberg.blogspot.com 3/19 

      If you are a patriotic American and a responsible citizen of the world, you must read these stories and pass them on before the world forgets and history repeats itself. 

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
  -- Martin Niemöller
     

                         Never Again!