The Holocaust: Have We Forgotten?

'Society distance[d] itself from the Holocaust, as though one could be infected by getting too close to such an eruption of evil, but it was like covering a volcano with cement. The basic questions-How could it have happened? How could human beings do such things to each other within a civilized society? Why did no one interfere?-remain unanswered. . . Yet I sense that another process is beginning, a movement toward a deeper understanding of the Holocaust as a human possibility' (Bar-On 5).

There is no shortage of information about the Second World War available to us. We study it in school, we have seen the documentaries and the monuments. Filmmakers like Steven Spielburg have created moving cinematic representations of what happened. Yet how often do we apply this knowledge to the contemporary world?

In school children are taught facts. They can tell you what years the war began and ended, and where the major battles were fought. I wonder, though, if they could tell us the most important lesson from the War-How do we prevent that kind of brutality from happening again?

We obviously have not learned this lesson. The world is still at war. The Middle East is riddled with troops and terrorists; car bombs explode weekly, if not daily. Much of Africa is unsafe. We are all self-righteous with the knowledge of later generations, and appalled that no one stopped the Nazis sooner. Yet genocides occurred in Rwanda and Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

What we need is to change our thinking about the Holocaust. Rather than just learning about it, we need to feel about it and try to understand it 'as a human possibility.' It is not just the stuff of fiction. It was real.

Albert Einstein said that, 'He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him a spinal cord would suffice.'