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Editorial: Remembering the Holocaust |
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Dan Veaner
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Friday, 28 April 2006 |
I am writing this on the first International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and have just come back from hearing Fred Voss speak to Lansing students about his experiences with the Nazis (read the full story in next week's Star). His talk was indescribably moving. Growing up I was taught that remembering the Holocaust is the most important way to avoid a repeat episode, and to honor those 6 million Jews, not to mention handicapped people, gypsies, Poles, Russians and others considered by the Nazis to be inferior who were slaughtered in Nazi Germany. Voss is a piece of living history who suffered the loss of his home, much of his family and his country.
It is important to remember that in 1940s Germany nobody imagined that such a thing could happen. It was the complacency of the large percentage of German people looking the other way that was as much to blame as Hitler. As a result nearly two thirds of all European Jews were murdered in what the German Government dubbed "The Final Solution."
These are impressive numbers, but it is easy to become desensitized by numbers this large. As I watched Voss recount his experiences as a child and a young man I couldn't help picturing the students in the room in his shoes. I imagined a teacher coming into the High School Library, singling out a student to beat or humiliate. I imagined a student picking out another of the kids for the Gestapo and the room full of students watching in fear as he is dragged out of the school.
Possibly the most hair raising thing Voss did was to ask 40 of the students to stand, representing the number of students in his class in a school in Germany. Then he asked all but seven to sit down, representing the only survivors of his class. That's a lot of people, especially when you know them personally. That's what he did best, he made the Holocaust personal for the students attending.
We all think, "it couldn't happen here." The point is that it could. The Germans didn't think it could happen there, but it did. That is why it is so important to remember and listen to the remaining survivors of that nightmare while we can, to remember their stories and pass them down to new generations. The children who were murdered in Germany were someone's children, like ours are.
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