FROMONLINE | 2013-04-29

  • By Tami Lange
  • April 29, 2013
  • 431
                        
The United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. marked its 20th anniversary last week. About 1,000 survivors attended, along with the soldiers who liberated them from the camps. A spokesperson said the museum had decided not to wait until the 25th anniversary, given the age of the honorees. My husband and I visited the museum a few years after it opened. To say it was an unforgettable experience does not even begin to do it justice. We were tearful, uncomfortable and speechless as we moved through the displays, the photos, the tapes of testimony of those who had lived through the type of hell that would be completely unimaginable, were it not true. The anniversary is going to be marked with a new exhibit: “Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity During the Holocaust.” It’s just a reminder that the Holocaust would not have been made possible without legions of everyday citizens who were “just doing their jobs” or who just stood by and did nothing. That has got to be a pretty powerful indictment. You didn’t have to be a rabid Nazi to do this to 6 million people. Really, all you had to do was nothing. Be silent. Turn your back. Go with the flow. At the end – when the camps were liberated and the world saw what had been done – we swore there would never be a repeat. Never again. No more wagons full of corpses. Never again. No more families wiped off the face of the earth. Never again No more standing by and doing nothing. It sounds so good, like we learned a terrible, hard lesson but we’re better than that now. Except we’re not. Not really. Aside from the fact that the younger you are, the less you probably know about what happened 70 to 80 years ago, modern-day genocide is still a fact of life. In Bosnia. In Rwanda. In Darfur. And perhaps soon in Syria. The difference is that lo, those many decades ago, we didn’t have technology that brought the world right to our fingertips in a matter of seconds. It was easy to “not know” what was going on in the 1930s and ‘40s. We had news reels and dispatches from the front line and photos. But they all took time. Not so today. Today there is no blaming our own ignorance for inaction. It’s easy to turn a blind eye when we have struggles of our own. We hang on to jobs, to insurance, to a lifestyle we have grown used to and aim to protect. No one can blame us for that. But when we’re too busy to look around and notice that some of our fellow humans are just trying to survive, that’s when we start to become part of the problem. And then how can we say, “Never again.”


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