memories

[Don Corleone]

The real tragedy of the Holocaust isn't just that it happened, but how it happened and why it happened. We all like to villify the Nazis and think "Thank God, those nasty creatures are gone. We'll never let them come to power again". Ditto for Stalinists or the Khmer Rouge or whatever boogeyman upon which we wish to project our darker selves. But whenever I delve into the various genocides of the past century, I'm struck not by the magnamity of the crimes, but by the intimacy of them.

Citing the Shoah as a specific example because I am much more familiar with it, not because it is somehow more atrocious or 'worse' than the others:

The Nazis didn't just erupt from the bowels of hell like Saruman's Uruk Hai. Despite how desparately we need for this to be true so that we can live with ourselves, it never will be. Never. It was a crime we perpetrated upon ourselves.

It was the newspaper boy, all grown up with his pretty brown shirt, that dragged off the 8-year old girl and her parents off to the train station to be loaded into the cattle car. He knew them because he delivered their paper, and at Christmas, they gave him a tip, even though they were Jewish.

It was the piano teacher, hired into her new role as KZ matron, who tore her former pupil from his beseeching mother's arms and hauled him off to meet his fate in a chlorine shower.

It was the handyman, who once sought odd jobs from the middle class eldrly couple down the street, that broke their skulls open with his baton, gleefully watching their life end before his very eyes, their faces upturned in uncomprehending fear, pain and betrayal....

And it was the collective "not my problem, I'm not a Jew" or "not a Pole" or "not a gypsy" that allowed the rest of us to turn a blind eye when anyone with half a brain knew exactly what was going on after November 9th, 1938.

It is our lack of ability to empathize with the rest of mankind that is the real tragedy that virtually guarantees in one form or another, they'll be repeated.