19 Apr Homo Homini Lupus
Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the spirit of that event, I have a confession to make – albeit one that involves extenuating circumstances. I have been to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. a handful of times. And while I always find it riveting and distressing, I have never been quite as moved by it as others appear to be or as I think I should be.
Why is that, you ask? Is there something wrong with me? Well, as I said, there are extenuating circumstances.
My father was, for forty years, a professor of electrical engineering. When I was nine – in 1979 – he was asked to present papers at two separate conferences, one in Prague and the other in Montreux, Switzerland. He and my mother decided to take the opportunity to take the whole fam damily to Europe, building a vacation around the two conferences – a three-week vacation.
Sometime in early June – around the feast of Corpus Christi – we happened to be in Munich for a couple of days. On the first day, we visited the Olympic Park, the site of the summer games only seven years prior. Having recently met Mark Spitz, I was excited to see the pool where he accomplished his amazing feat, in addition to all the other venues. But guess what? I don’t remember a single thing about the pool or much else about the athletics complex. The only thing I remember about the Park was the story of the massacre, the attack on the Israeli athletes by the Palestinian terrorist group calling itself Black September. I was nine, recall, and the story – which I hadn’t heard before – shook me.
And that was only just the start.
The following morning, we loaded up the rented Simca and drove the roughly 15 kilometers from Munich to Dachau. That day – like the day before and every day we were in Munich – was dark and gray, rainy, and unseasonably cool (at least for a kid used to Nebraska summers). In short, it was miserable, as befits the day one visits the longest-running of the Nazi concentration camps.
I can’t say that I remember everything or that everything I do remember I remember vividly. (It was 44 years ago, after all). But I do remember the ovens (i.e. the crematoria). I suppose part of the reason I recall them so graphically is that I believed, in my nine-year-old mind, that the ovens were used on live people. We’d already seen the Brausebad, i.e. the “Shower-bath” that was, in truth, a gas chamber, and it didn’t seem so far-fetched that people who would do that would also burn people alive. Heck, it still doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
By Alexandre Gilbert – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70041539
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H26996 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5434049
The other thing I remember is the pictures of the survivors greeting the American Army. The Nazis had tried to evacuate the camp in the days before its surrender, but they could only move (death march) about 10,000 of them. I remember being horrified at the skeleton-people – starved, heads shaved, teeth rotting out of their mouths – smiling, cheering, and crying, all that the same time. It all seemed so bizarre, so surreal, so…inhuman. The idea that some people could do this to other people – their neighbors, friends, fellow countrymen – struck me as profoundly frightening, profoundly evil.
Over the course of our trip, we saw two Soviet (or, at least, Soviet-style) military convoys in Czechoslovakia (then firmly behind the Iron Curtain), had a dedicated bellhop (a “defector” from Cleveland who was almost certainly KGB) at our hotel in Prague, visited Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and found the still war-damaged church in Třeboň where my great-grandfather was baptized.
As it turned out, this was less a “vacation” than a parent-guided field trip on history, war, and man’s inhumanity to man. It was also, I can say without hesitation, one of the most important things my parents did for me and one of the formative events of my childhood. Generally, people don’t remember vacations they took 44 years ago, much less feel deep and sincere gratitude to those who took them on it. But this one was different.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all of this a great deal lately. Obviously, yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. But there are other triggers as well: Every time I see another story about another survey showing increasing incidents of anti-Semitism or every time the ass***e who co-founded Pink Floyd goes off on another rant about the Israelis, whom he clearly views as subhuman, or every time I see a story like this one:
A visitor to Auschwitz is facing backlash after she smiled and struck a modeling pose for a photo while sitting on the railroad tracks leading into the former concentration camp.
The visitor appeared to be unmoved by the solemn site in Poland as a photographer crouched to snap the shot on the tracks where trains carried hundreds of thousands of Jews and others to their deaths….
The woman, wearing a red flannel shirt, black top and black pants, is smiling as she gazes skyward while visitors walk toward the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
The former Nazi complex now serves as a research center and memorial to the roughly 1.1 million who were slaughtered during the Holocaust in World War II.
Sometimes, I think that maybe we – as a civilization – don’t spend enough time and effort teaching our kids about the Holocaust and its causes. I see the videos of kids on various campuses who don’t know who the Nazis were and don’t know what the “Final Solution” was, and I wonder what’s wrong with us. But then, I also know that my two oldest kids have both read Elie Wiesel’s Night, which is part of the standard high-school curriculum in our local school district. I don’t think this is necessarily a case that we have forgotten that which we were never to forget.
Rather, I think it’s the case that we – again, as a civilization – don’t care. At least we don’t care as much as we used to or as much as we should. Antisemitism is on the rise, in the United States and throughout the world. Much of that antisemitism is accompanied by vandalism and/or violence. This isn’t the result of a lack of education. It’s the result of callousness and of barbarism. It is also, as we have noted many times in these pages, often the harbinger of greater social unrest and violence.
We wish that every child could have the opportunity to visit the remains of a concentration camp when they are nine. Unfortunately, we’re not entirely sure it would have the impact we’d hope.
