Archive: Opinions

A humorous article on The Consumerist Web site the other morning about what must have been a typographical error that claimed the world is only 400 years old got me to thinking.  There are people who claim the Holocaust didn't happen.  Yet when you meet Holocaust survivors like Fred Voss, who spoke at Lansing High School Wednesday, the fact of the Holocaust is hard to refute.  Voss's generation will be gone soon, and then what?

Growing up, I was taught that the story of the Holocaust must be remembered and recounted in order to insure that something like that would never happen again.  The concept was that people learn from their mistakes, and peoples can do the same.  If you look at world news today that has not actually proven true, but perhaps that means that events like the Holocaust need to be even more a part of our collective consciousness.

Conspiracy theories are fun.  How many stories and movies have we seen claiming that Americans never landed on the moon?  I remember watching the moon landing as a kid.  It looked real to me.  What advantage would the government and news media realize by perpetrating such an elaborate fraud?  But even though I know the notion is nonsense I can see how it's fun to consider a scenario in which it was all fabricated.

Refuting the Holocaust is an entirely different matter.  50 million people lost their lives in World War II because of the Nazis.  While Jews have always accounted for only a small fraction of the general population, six million of them were slaughtered by the Nazis.  Voss and his wife lost 67 family members in the Holocaust.  Voss was nearly captured and killed, and because Jews were not allowed to attend school he never finished high school, killing his dream of becoming a doctor.

To me refuting the existence of the Holocaust is even worse than sympathizing with the Nazis, which is plenty reprehensible.  It ignores the value of the lives of those 50 million people and the things they could have accomplished.  It ignores the supreme destructiveness of tearing down civilization, and the lesson that ordinary people can easily be led down the road of targeting groups of fellow human beings just because they are different.

With the generation of Holocaust survivors gone, upcoming generations are going to have a harder time of remembering, and will have to work harder to remind others.  Many people say it could never happen here or it will never happen again.  That kind of complacency is exactly what allowed it to happen in Germany in the 1930s and '40s.  If you had told the average German in the early '30s what was to come I suspect he or she would never believe you.  In fact, Voss said that patriotic Jewish Germans found it hard to believe, even as they were being victimized and slaughtered.

That is worth remembering now and forever so it never happens again.

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