A Forgotten Tragedy

The Holocaust in all its nakedness was presented on the screen ... I shed no tears. I understood everything, but the pain was too great for tears.

These were the words of an 11 or 12 year old child who innocently turned on the television as she waited for her parents to return from their errands. The day: Holocaust Remembrance Day. The place: somewhere in Israel. The child: daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her parents had not spoken to their daughter about the horrors they had survived.

Last year, 2024, I saw nothing, absolutely nothing, on the US news about Holocaust Remembrance Day. There was nothing about the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz on this day in 1945. Not a single word.

Train tracks that took Jews from Berlin to various concentration camps

Why is this? Is it because the Holocaust and World War II ended 80 years ago and there are few still alive who lived through the horror? Is it because so much of the world's population doesn't even know about the Holocaust other than as a distant event perhaps taught in schools, much as people of my generation studied the American civil war? 

Section of Berlin track that gave date of deportation and number of Jews deported

Is it due to the increase in acts of anti-Semitism here and abroad? Is it because, quite simply, no one cares?

I am not Jewish, but I have read dozens of books, both historical fiction and autobiographical, about the Holocaust. I did a 10-day trip to Berlin and to Poland to study the origins of the Holocaust, to spend multiple days at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and to spend time viewing exhibits not available to the general public and to visit with those working to conserve the artifacts left behind when the camp was evacuated. I have a friend who lost much of her family in the Holocaust.

This atrocity, which took the lives of some 6,000,000 people, 1.1 million of them in the Auschwitz camps, must not be forgotten. It should be taught in high school history classes. It should be discussed in ethics classes. 

It should never be forgotten.