by Rocket

Created on: May 01, 2008   Last Updated: July 19, 2010

I live in Israel, and my husband is the son of holocaust survivors. No they were not in camps, they were the lucky ones. Sent away by their parents to Sweden, they survived. But their parents and family that remained behind did not.

My husband and I found a letter the other day from my husband's mother's sister. The letter was from 1941, in Czech, and we had a former classmate of my mother-in-law's who is still alive translate it for us. In the letter the sister said she was hurt that my mother-in-law did not inform her of her engagement.

Since my mother-in-law was sent away at 13 or 14 and got married at 20, it tells me that although she never returned home, she was in contact with her family for several years before they were taken away to the concentration camps. Although we have heard bits and pieces from several concentration survivors, we really didn't have a clear picture of her individual history. This letter made it more real for me and what struck me and what is even more chilling was the normalcy of life for those remaining behind in Europe who really did not grasp what was happening or that it would really happen to them.

I hate remembering the holocaust, my husband even more. But it doesn't matter. We have to remember the horror of it, not just because we may relive it again, but in order not to allow ourselves to sink into complacency with the feeling that everything in the world is okay, in order not to allow ourselves to shut out the world with the belief it will all work out. It is our responsibility to remember that words are not just words, that petty jealousies are not harmless, and that all the negativity and hatred of human beings can be channeled into mass hysteria. It did happen.

We are our brothers' keepers and it is our responsibility to recognize and prevent another holocaust happening to anyone, but this Holocaust must be remembered all by itself for its own sake: it was not murder by passion or competition between different groups of people. It was not murder against a population that was turning against its' own country or another country. It was calculated, planned, and recorded industrially by a country against members of its own society who were unarmed and helpless, and it transformed all of Nazi Germany into one big, efficient and indifferent killing machine.

When Jews today hear the words of Iran's Ahmadinijad, they are reminded that only 60 years ago, 6 million of them and many more others were killed by someone who said the same things he is getting away with saying now. We want to ignore him; we want to believe he is a stupid smart alec. But we can't. And the rest of the world shouldn't either.

Denials of the Holocaust should be met with a quick no-nonsense look at the handwritten records made by the Germans, listing each and every single person that perished in the Holocaust. So into doing tasks to perfection the total immorality and shame of what they were doing escaped them. These rosters alone should wipe out any further denials. But if that still doesn't work there are films of what the allied soldiers found when they entered the camps.

Yes, we have to remember the Holocaust. A world that allowed this to happen once can never let it happen again and therefore we are all forced to remember. Those who could have prevented it and didn't, even if they were not perpetrators, also have a collective hand in this guilt. And we Jews, who did not believe such a thing could happen, we now know it can and can never take anything for granted again.

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