Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 76th anniversary of the Red Army liberating Auschwitz, Poland in the last winter of World War II.
You and I might like to believe that in our world today it is impossible that this fact could ever be forgotten but, looking across the globe, and the country not only is that not so but we encounter deniers who lie to themselves and others by insisting that none of the nightmare that was the Nazi's Final Solution ever even happened.
I almost understand, except because we don't all seem to have time for the truth, the lie gets another chance to spread some more and oozes its way into more lives as we sink a little deeper into the muck of our own perdition. To be clear: Holocaust deniers are not misinformed. They are evil for believing, for persisting, and for insisting that the horrors that happened, didn't occur.
Every year, there are fewer and fewer survivors of Auschwitz who observe the anniversary of its liberation and in the not-too-distant future there will be no one alive with first-hand recollections. That's why today, in a world of darkness and death driven by deep-seated, irrational hatreds of all kinds, we, each of us, need to be a witness for the truth of the Holocaust and of injustice and murder anywhere and everywhere we find it on this earth.
As a child on the rare occasions when I’d hear grown-ups tell stories about "The War" in which they’d fought they never mentioned the death camps-at least I don’t remember hearing anything. Perhaps their stories focused on a Europe that was an ocean away and even then, there was a reticence and reluctance to revisit a tortured time and a tendency to let the past remain the past. And what did that get us?
I'm the grown-up now and the cautionary tale the Ha-Shoah should have been, does not seem to be a lesson we have even started to learn. There are mindless murders every day in every corner of the globe because of the color of skin, the choice of a God, the shape of an eyelid, always some variation of our fear of The Other.
Here at home. we are NOT much better especially after a Presidential campaign whose vitriol-fueled falsehoods were so ubiquitous, they seemed endless as we denigrated and dehumanized those with whom we disagreed, rendering them abstractions and easier to hate and then hating them deeply and completely.
Years ago, I came across Paul Chernofsky’s book, “And EveryoneWas Someone.” I think it’s still in print, or should be; you should read it. It's important someone can always bear witness to who we were and how easily all of that hatred happened and how it can happen again. Everyone's shadow is the same color but far too often we choose to forget that.
-bill kenny
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