Today is a day set aside by the international community to recall the more than eleven million people, six million of them Jews, who were killed during Nazi Germany's Holocaust. This was the death of innocent people, carried out with typical German efficiency, on a scale that had been unheard of, and has never been matched since in genocides afterward.
During the course of the Nuremberg Trials for the war crimes committed, there was nothing adequate to charge people with for this level of death. A new word entered the lexicon of the world, "Genocide". The systematic destruction of a people via rape, war, etc. is a simple definition of it. An entire treaty banning it had to be written just to charge the top German officials with a crime so heinous that it had lacked a definition only years before.
Out of the course of the Holocaust, mankind's medical knowledge expanded greatly thanks to the efforts of Nazi scientists such as Dr. Joseph Mengele; the self proclaimed Angel of Death. However, despite the gains that were made in the realm of knowledge, it came at the expense of so many innocent lives and at the cost of, some would argue, people's humanity. The first written code of legal research ethics would come about as a result of the Holocaust, and though violated innumerable times since, it stands as the basis of all law for research that exists today.
One thing that came out of the Holocaust that most people recall, or are taught in school at least, are the two most famous words of World War Two, "Never Forget". When Pol Pot carried out the Cambodian genocide, we turned a blind eye and we forgot. When Rwanda had a genocide, mostly by machete, we forgot, and the UN Peacekeepers on the ground were ordered not to fire on the people butchering civilians directly outside their gates. When rape and murder amounting to genocide swept across the southern Sudan in Darfur, we forgot. When the Balkans was in the throws of ethnic cleansing, we mostly forgot.
Or perhaps we did not forget, so much as we failed to care enough to get involved. It is often attributed to Joseph Stalin that one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic. We see one emaciated child shot against a wall and it can rouse a world to stop an event, but if we hear that thousands are being butchered, we do nothing.
Today is a day that we must not forget, not only for those who have died in the Holocaust, but for the sake of future generations that are to come. Yet, forget we do...a fifth of German youth surveyed can't tell you what Auschwitz is, when it was liberated in Poland 67 years ago today. Of those who are aware, almost half believe that the Jews talk too much about the Holocaust still, that history should stay history.
Earlier today, I stopped by the Holocaust memorial here in town. I stood silently before that simple bench, dwelling on how we should never forget what happened and how often we do. What I didn't realize, was that half a world away, a survivor of Auschwitz had just died; the director of the memorial at Auschwitz, Kazimierz Smolen, a 91 year old survivor of the camp had died in a hospital bed in Oswiecim, the town where the camp was located. Slowly but surely, those who lived the horrors are dying out, and it is our duty to remember what happened in those awful places in those dark years. As Elie Weisel once said, "for the dead and the living, we must bear witness."
The simple memorial here in town. I often go there to pray for the intercessions of Saint Edith Stein and
Saint Maximilian Kolbe, while praying that such a horror may never
happen again.
No comments:
Post a Comment