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Don’t Forget Auschwitz

I was saddened when I recently read this headline: “What’s Auschwitz?  2/3 of millennials don’t know it was a Nazi death camp, survey reports.”  Immediately, the well-known line from historian, George Santayana.  He said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  The lesson is don’t forget!  I suppose most people my age should remember Auschwitz.  It was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps.  Located in occupied Poland, Auschwitz was the scene of the death of over one million Jews and others.  It is a primary symbol of the brutality of the Nazi regime.  I will never forget Auschwitz.
   
Apparently younger folks either don’t learn about it or forget Auschwitz.  While at one level, I am not surprised, I am sad and hopeful something can be done about youth education.  Perhaps more troubling would be the young person who may have heard of Auschwitz, but didn’t know it was a “killing camp.”  Millennials are those roughly speaking, 18-34.  This is not an unfortunate abstraction for me. 
   
I have known some concentration camp survivors, although those who survived Nazi destruction are quite old now.  It has been over seventy years since the end of WW II.  The survivors soon will all be gone.  Memory is all we will have.  But memory should be strong enough never to let it happen again.  I think of my colleague who is Jewish and had grandparents killed in those Nazi camps.  What can she tell her millennial friends to keep memory alive?  And what will she teach the newer Generation Z students who are just now entering the college scene?
   
As I read deeper into the article, which is citing a recent survey, I was dismayed to learn that of all adults in America, 41% don’t know about Auschwitz.  Obviously, this includes the millennials, but adds to that other, older Americans who also don’t know the Auschwitz story.  And that figure will certainly grow.  The survey quotes Rabbi Marvin Hier, who gives us a reason for remembering.
   
Hier says, “One mistake Americans and millennials make is treating the Holocaust as part of archaeology, (that) it disappeared from the planet, and it will never return…I think it's very dangerous and it's an important wake-up call for Americans, for the GIs and families of the GIs who fought to eliminate Nazism.  It shows the importance of institutions that keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.”  A couple things are noteworthy here. 
   
The first point Hier makes is to recognize some folks may know Auschwitz as a place identified with WW II, but it is a place that has archaeological significance.  To be archaeologically significant usually means it is historical, but now a ruins.  It is interesting as a historical fact, but has little relevance to life today.  It is as if archaeological sites are not quite “real.”  Even when they were quite real in their own time, they have little, to no connection to real life today.  We have forgotten.  And soon, we will not even learn. 
   
The second feature of Hier’s words is the focus on waking up.  Forgetting is like sleep.  We are unaware and if you are unaware, you cannot care.  We need to wake up and become aware.  But we are not to be aware to simply learn the history lesson.  Auschwitz is more than history---sad as that is.  Auschwitz is also future.  Auschwitz is the future of any possibility that humans can once again be inhuman to others.  Auschwitz is the possibility of hate’s dominance---of evil’s victory.  Auschwitz is a reminder of the fact that humans can become that bad---that we can literally become monsters. 
   
Of course, none of think of ourselves in that fashion.  Probably the Germans in the 1930s-40s did not think about themselves that way either.  I suspect no one wakes up one morning and opts to become a monster.  Rather, that quality of our potentiality evolves---grows and matures into adult forms of evil.  If Jesus is God incarnate, Auschwitz is evil incarnate.  At Auschwitz evil became more than a philosophical idea.  It became a living, breathing reality.  And it caused unthinkable harm and death. 
   
Auschwitz is the name of all the worst that humans can bring.  It manifested itself in the killing fields of Cambodia and in the use of chemical weapons by Syrians on their own people.  It is too easy to underestimate the dastardly possibilities we humans carry inside.  These possibilities have to be countered with spiritual vision that love is the core of it all.  And with this vision we need to evolve a strategy that the protest song of the ‘60s heralded: “ain’t going to study war no more.” 
   
The call to all spiritual women and men is the call to become peacemakers.  Peacemakers pay attention to Auschwitz in order never to forget.  Instead of becoming an archaeological site, Auschwitz serves as a living museum---to teach all of us how to live the good life.  We want that for ourselves and we learn to want it for every living human being. 
   
That’s why it is imperative not to forget Auschwitz.

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