Remembering the Shoah

The interior of Yad Vashem.

Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Were we not going through our own fascist moment, I would have written about it. But the living take precedence over the dead.

However, the dead must never be forgotten. They must be remembered every day. Their stories must be told and retold. For their stories are the history of our species. Their stories instruct. Their stories tell the tales of our great falls and our great redemptions.

The fact is that the global left has spent decades minimizing the Shoah, because its raison d'etre is hatred of Israel. It can't acknowledge that Israel was created as a refuge after the world's antisemitism eradicated half of the world's Jews. And spare me that "Europeans punished Arabs for their own sins" by recognizing Israel. Read this. Germany's allies in the Middle East sought to replicate the Shoah in their own lands.

The sad realization is that "never again" was a lie. Even as soon as twenty years after the war, when Israel was putting Adolf Eichmann on trial, many in the West were saying that Israel had gone too far. The historical revisionism began almost immediately. And fascists in the United States were the main drivers of it, free from the strictures imposed in Europe. It is no secret that neo-Nazis in Germany flew Confederate battle flags in their marches because the Nazi flag was forbidden.

"Never again" has always been honored more in the breach than the observance. It was a comforting lie that liberal democracies told themselves about their superior morality, but did little to enforce and inculcate into their citizens. I grew up in the Vatican II Church, where Catholics tried to make amends for two millennia of vile antisemitism and violence. And certainly someone like Pope Leo XIV, I'm sure, honors that tradition. But how many Catholic schools make the teaching of anti-antisemitism a core part of the curriculum? The West has backslidden horribly on continuing the fight from the 1930s. The next president of France may be from a party whose founder served in a French SS division. (Yes, the French also tell themselves comforting lies about their "resistance" during the war.)

The Shoah must be remembered because it was the moment when two millennia of anti-Jewish hate found its inescapable outlet. That 15 million people can engender so much illogical hatred is a curiosity of human culture. Is it because Jews are a "stiff-necked" people who will not bow down to the dominant culture? Is it because Jews, prohibited from many trades, were shackled with the economic roles which those cultures found demeaning but were essential, and thus provided a convenient scapegoat? All of the above?

Jews are the ultimate "Other". To the Left, they are the most oppressive of oppressive "whites". Of course, they're nothing of the kind. If Jews were "white", the Shoah wouldn't have occurred. And to the Right, they're not white. They are the ultimate corrupters of civilization, tied to no land, parasites in their host countries. (Which would make them having their own state to where they could withdraw seemingly a necessity. But, of course, that state "belonged" to Palestinians, a group which didn't exist before the Balfour Declaration of 1917. A group which was "indigenous" to the Land, and not the Jews who had an uninterrupted 3,000 year habitation of what is now and was then Israel.)

That's all the bad. But I want to dwell on the good. Brought to us by our own Rico.

Also, on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, as a segment of our society continues to work itself into a frenzy to demonize and attack and imprison and brutalize "the other," I read the story below. That fucking broke me. This is who humanity should be. This is what "never forget" means.

*** 

I lived in England my junior year of college in the 90s. I lived with a British family who became my British family. They had a friend, D, and he was a WWII veteran. He had been in the battle of Dunkirk all the way to the end of the European war. After D-Day he was put on-loan to an American division to assist with their communications. This was the division who liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

I will say the rest as he said it to me—as best as I remember.

"No one talks about the smell. I had been a soldier for several years at this point. I knew what death smelled like. But this, this was more than death. This was systematic. It was horrible beyond words. This was evil. The physicians had gotten there before us and told us that we couldn’t hand over our food to them. It struck me as wrong but they said it would be worse. I started documenting.

"And then…This little boy. This tiny little boy came over to me and fell at my feet. He said something in Polish and then passed out. All of a sudden why I was here was crystal clear. This boy was not going to die. Somehow this boy was going to live. I called an American soldier and together we found a doctor. My American friend stayed with the child as I tried to find someone who knew Polish and English to tell me what he said.

"I kept repeating the phrase and a woman who had been helping came over to me and asked me to repeat the phrase. She was so thin and so frail I had no idea how she was still alive. I repeated the phrase and said a little boy had said it to me. She started to weep. I thought I had inadvertently stepped on her foot or hurt her and she said, “No, it is good that after this I can still weep. The child said, ‘Papa, I knew you would come for me.’ The child still has hope and it is good.”

"I went to see him. He was asleep on a cot. He looked so small. I relieved my American friend and sat next to the child. I took his hand. And his grip tightened on my hand in his sleep. He said the Polish phrase again. And I sent a telegram to my wife who was pregnant with our first child.

"I tried to explain that if we didn’t find his people, I wanted to adopt him. Her answer lives in my heart. Four words.

'Bring our son home.'"

D pulled out his wallet and showed me the telegram with those words. I then looked at him, his wife, and their son. Their son, A, was a big man—linebacker big. While D and his wife were lithe. A pulled back his sleeve and showed me the number on his arm. He said that he tried to make living a good life, full of love, his mission.

This Holocaust Remembrance Day — I remember A and all those who did not get a happy ending. And to make my life one that does them honor.

"Never forget" is a moral obligation. The relativists will howl. But they are of the darkness. The relativists will cavil about "other genocides". But they don't care about those other genocides save for using them as a cudgel against Jews. "Never forget" is one of my moral compasses. Because "never again" is a remembrance of the utter darkness of humanity. And because "never again" is a clarion call to remember what is best about humanity.

You have a choice. You can equivocate. Or you can stand by morality and humanity. I know which side I'm on.

***

As a proud UCLA Bruin, I have a jocularly cantankerous relationship with our rival USC. But I urge you all to go to the Shoah Project. The ancestors are leaving us to their rest. And their history must be carried on by us.