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Facing the Holocaust and Its Victims: A Personal Challenge

2008

When I was a teenager, I read "The Diary of Anne Frank". I can't remember all the details of her story. What I remember most is feeling sorrow for her, and I recall having a growing sense of anticipation and dread as I progressed through the book.

I grew up in a time when WWII and the Holocaust weren't quite as much a part of the past as now. I remember that while I was still young, the Nazi war criminals were being pursued, caught, and tried. Some had taken new identities and begun new lives in places like Brazil, but the determination to find them was relentless. They were brought to account for their participation in the atrocities they helped Hitler to bring upon masses of their fellow humans.

I don't know exactly when it was that I found I couldn't bear to think about the Holocaust and the details of it much, let alone read about it, see movies on it, and look at the pictures of it. I was always sensitive and empathetic to the suffering and tragedies of others, and that sensitivity grew as I aged as did my avoidance of it. I felt guilty and cowardly about it. After all, I didn't actually experience it as did the victims of it. I didn't endure the extreme physical and mental torture that was inflicted upon the Jewish population. I didn't suffer the indignities and agonies that they suffered. How could I be so arrogant as to say it made me suffer too much to look upon the pictures of those who actually experienced it?

It did though. It broke my heart to look upon the faces of the children, the aged, the men, the women. It made me want to take their suffering from them, even though I know that I couldn't endure it with the strength and courage with which so many of them did. Thus, for many years of my life, I remained in avoidance; I hid from the Holocaust and those poor, unfortunate souls. In essence, I turned my back on them.

Recently a friend and I were going to make a trip to the area of Florida near St. Petersburg. My friend, Buzz, has an interest in World War II and in the Holocaust. There is a Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg that I knew he would like to visit, so I agreed very reluctantly, even nervously, to go. I have another friend, in England, Jim, who also has an interest in the Holocaust and, in particular, the victims of it. I had told him about the interest Buzz has in it and that I had agreed to see the museum with much dread.

Jim told me that I must go and that I must look upon the

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