“…, the artless aniline blue of 108016 tattooed on my father’s forearm was an abiding sign of the past on our present. It was his alone and then, as much as a thing can ever be, it became mine, and now it’s yours we can share.”
Melvin Jules Bukiet.
We live in a time of unparalleled instances of genocide and ethnocide. The Holocaust, the genocides in Darfur, Turkey, Cambodia, Tibet and Bosnia, the disappearances in Argentina and Chile, the death squad killing in El Salvador, the killing of the Tutsi in Rwanda…and the list goes on.
The Shoah is defined as the planned, systematic murder of Jews who were living in European lands occupied or dominated by Germany during World War II. The war began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. What then appeared to the world to be the random killing of Jews, further developed into a program of mass murder of Jews on a daily basis. Ask any soldier who was at the liberation of Dachau to describe what he saw and the words could not be expressed. Germany’s surrender on May 8. 1945 brought the war in Europe to an end. 6,000,000 Jewish men, women, and children had been systematically killed.
Many of the survivors felt the need to record their eyewitness accounts, to memorialize their destroyed families, to remember their pre-war way of life. Some memoirs, written soon after the war, introduced the Holocaust to the public consciousness. In recent years, time and the natural aging process have been the impetus for many others to record their memories for posterity.
The will to live, to have hope, to survive and to rebuild –this is what gives the Holocaust its universality. Jews are known as the People of the Book, that book being the Bible, the narrative of their origins, laws, and early history. The need to write and record, to document and to remember are all an integral part of Jewish tradition. The Holocaust is not the only genocide of the twentieth century but it is in many ways the most documented one.
Once the Nazis succeeded in ending democracy and turning Germany into a one-party dictatorship they carefully executed a massive propaganda campaign to win the loyalty and cooperation of Germans, The Nazi Propaganda Ministry, directed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, took control of all forms of communication in Germany: newspapers, magazines, books, public meetings and rallies, art, music movies and radio. Viewpoints that in any way threatened the Nazi beliefs were censored or eliminated from all public viewing.
During the spring of 1933, Nazi student organizations, professors, and librarians made up long lists of books they thought should not be read by Germans. Then, on the night of May 10, 1933, Nazis raided libraries and bookstores across Germany. They marched by torchlight in nighttime parades, sang chants, and threw books into huge bonfires. On that night more than 25,000 books were burned. Some were works of Jewish writers, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. However, most of the books were by non-Jewish writers, including such famous Americans as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis.
Schools also played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas and brain washing the young. While some books were removed from classrooms by censors, other textbooks, newly written were brought in to teach students blind obedience to the party, love for Hitler and anti-Semitism. After-school meetings of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls further indoctrinated the children to be faithful to the Nazi party and even to spy on their parents and report any disloyalty to the Fuhrer. In school and out, young people celebrated such occasions as Adolf Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of his taking power.
We have studied all of the aforementioned and yet…….
No one would refute the fact that we live in very troubled times. It then becomes even more vital that a greater understanding of the psychological, political and societal roots of human cruelty, mass violence and genocide be developed. We need to continue to examine the factors which enable individuals to perpetrate evil and the impact that apathetic bystanders play in fueling human violence. Yes, silence is deadly. Sixty+ years after the Shoah, we still need to develop policies, strategies and programs to effectively counteract these atrocities. Let us begin now.
Greta Brewer
VP, Education
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