Blog Post #5 ~ Ava L.

The Holocaust. It is a just a word, but the story behind those three syllables is far greater and has irrevocably changed human history.

Before studying this topic, the extent of my knowledge on the Holocaust amounted to “When Hitler and the Nazis tried to kill all the Jews during World War Two”, which is in some ways accurate, in others, entirely wrong. I have learned that the Holocaust was so much more than Hitler and the Nazis, more than Germany, more than the war. It was the systematic destruction of innocent people by other people. A civilian genocide enacted and carried out by civilians. Jewish men, women, and children were ostracized, targeted, captured, and eventually, mass murdered by their own countrymen. And what’s worse, the world turned a blind eye.

But no longer. Throughout my studies of the Holocaust and its effects, my eyes have been opened to the horrors that Jews, Romas, people of color, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and more faced during the 12 long years that the concentration camps branded themselves into our history books with hellfire. I bore witness to those tragedies through reading Night, a memoir of life the camps by survivor Elie Wiesel, Buna, a poem by Primo Levi, watched One Survivor Remembers, the story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's struggle as a young girl growing up during the Holocaust, and Life if Beautiful, a fictitious, but realistic account of a family’s experiences in Auschwitz. Each of these has affected me greatly; both bringing me to tears and bringing me to my senses.

Despite the endless accounts of the monstrosity we have named the Holocaust, many Americans still overlook that part of history. Some know but refuse to remember. They think that the Holocaust was a sad event in history that is best left forgotten, as it would be a shame to trouble the minds of the next generation with such a tragedy. But as Elie Wiesel says in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, “I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.”

We cannot forget.

But we are forgetting.

18,653,900 people or more were killed under Hitler’s orders.

41 percent of Americans have never heard of Auschwitz.

70 percent say that people care less about the Holocaust than they used to.

41 percent of Americans have never heard of the Holocaust.

I find the statistics unbelievable, but numbers do not capture the enormity of the problem. The fact that 41 percent of our country has never heard of an extremely recent genocide involving millions of people with survivors still alive today is shocking. But we must take action. Gerda Weissmann Klein said in her memoir, “Survival is both an exalted privilege and a painful burden.” The Holocaust suppressed the voices of many, and those of us who are have the privilege of life must bear witness, and encourage others to do the same. We must remember the victims and honor the survivors. We cannot forget. For the Holocaust is a wound that is so deep, it will take years to heal. But we must try, for the lost, and for the living.