Lessons

One of my earliest memories of the Holocaust being mentioned is seeing a movie on our shelf titled “Auschwitz,” and desperately begging my mother to let me watch it. Every time I asked, my mom refused saying that it wasn’t appropriate; it was about topics that I wouldn’t understand or wasn’t ready to learn about. I just wanted a break from Cinderella, but I got my first lesson on the Holocaust. Like many others I learned to associate the Holocaust with shame, and that it was not something discussed openly.

 
As a global community, the Holocaust should be approached with shame. It was a failure of democracy, something that we hold high and proud. The Nazis gained enough votes to earn seats in the government. Beyond some election fraud, the Nazis did nothing illegal in the quest for political power. I think that that might be the single most important message we can gain from the Third Reich. Democracy is not fool proof, it has the capability of failure. When we learn that the Nazis gained power through democratic means, it forces us to look at the weakness of our modern constitutions.

It’s never fun to examine ourselves and our own failures. Slavery isn’t treated with the same reproach that the Holocaust is. Americans are proud of overcoming of slavery, Jim Crow laws and denial of suffrage; because we’ve fixed many of those problems they’ve almost become successes. It’s easy to mention failures when they’re no longer failures.

But we’ve never really explained what failed when the Third Reich rose to power. Perhaps because so much was pure luck; Gustl enabled Hitler’s controlling habits; the Bavarian army didn’t question Hitler; Austria’s understanding with their military; the mix of economic downturns that gave Hitler a platform and listening ear; France’s misunderstanding about the number of troops in the early days of military power. It is conceivable that if just one of these things had not happened, the Holocaust would not have happened either.  It becomes this scapegoat that because everybody is in the wrong, nobody is in the wrong.

Genocide shows us that there is a huge human capacity for evil. And it forces us to reexamine the safe holds that we believe are in place against dictatorships. This is uncomfortable and shameful and difficult but it needs to be done so that we can begin to prevent future genocides. The fact that Genocide has occurred in Rwanda, Sudan, Bosnia and Cambodia since the Holocaust shows us that we have done nothing to learn from the Holocaust and the failures of modern society. Perhaps more importantly, it shows us that the Holocaust wasn’t an outlier or a black swan.

The Holocaust raises so many questions about human nature and the ability of democracy to protect society. And these questions don't really come with answers, most certainly not the answers we want to hear. We need to learn how to use our shame and embarrassment over letting the Holocaust happen to open real dialogue on how to prevent the next genocide and how to stop current ones.

I think it’s important to note the strength that is shown through the Holocaust. Anne Frank had her adolescence taken from her by the Nazis, yet after years in hiding she still had the strength to write “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are basically good at heart.” I’m not sure if I believe that knowing what I know about the Nazis, but it’s a strong sentiment that this young girl with such reason to hate the Nazis held enough faith in her moral compass to express such a positive outlook on humanity. Her ability to remain positive at the hands of such destruction makes me want to believe that at least some people are 'basically good at heart', and we just need to work a little harder to bring that side of humanity out.