Children…

The Holocaust
– lessons to be learned?
The war in Europe had two primary elements. One was
the catastrophic “conventional” political war, fought
over power and resources. Tens of millions of people
lost their lives, and the destruction was beyond comprehension.
But it also had an unprecedented element.
For the Nazis, this was an ideological war: it was the
“great race war” whose goal was to place Europe under
“Germanic” rule. Only by eliminating all other political
systems, and suppressing or eradicating undesirable
“races” and peoples, would it be won. At the centre
of this “war of annihilation” were Europe’s Jews, who
above all others were portrayed as “the enemy”. Their
goal was to make Europe forever “free of Jews” by physically
exterminating them.
We may wish that the Holocaust had never happened.
It is a genuinely horrendous subject to study, and
knowledge of it is not easy to bear. Primo Levi wrote:
“It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of
viciousness (…). One is tempted to turn away with a
grimace and close one’s mind; this is a temptation one
must resist.” For many reasons, this desire and temptation
to turn away or to forget is strong, and not only
for the perpetrators. Since 1945, influential voices have
argued that the past should remain in the past; that we
should “look to the future” and forget “all crimes and
follies of the past”.
French author Charlotte Delbo urged us instead,
“in order to understand”, to try and look at the bottomless
pit that was the world of Nazi concentration camps
without averting our gaze.Yet she also believed that the
knowledge she had been forced to learn as a political
prisoner in Birkenau was “useless”. This thought raises
many important questions: What is there to learn from
the Holocaust? Can we learn from it, and if so, how and
what? And, most importantly, why? For historian Omer
Bartov, most frightening is “the impossibility of learning
anything from the Holocaust”. For him, “the utter
uselessness of it all, the total and complete emptiness”
of the Holocaust makes questions about its purported
lessons futile.
Yet, there are reasons too compelling to leave it at
that. With each passing year, the war and the Holocaust
slide further into the past, and those with personal memories
of it are fewer and fewer.This is inevitable. But is it
inevitable that indifference, ignorance and silence – even
denial – should be the Holocaust’s only legacies, and
hence in effect the murderers’ final victory?
The genocide unfolded in the heart of Europe. It
will always influence the history and development of
our continent and of our world, and we must understand
why and how.At the very least, we must acknowledge
that it happened because people like you and me
chose to make it happen.They chose to conduct it over
many years, though they could have chosen otherwise.
The Holocaust, in fact, was not inevitable. Philosopher
Theodor Adorno emphasised this when he said that the
fundamental demand of all education must be that Auschwitz
is never repeated. If anything is to be learned
from the Holocaust, perhaps this is it.
“What is happening to the Jews
today could happen to another
people tomorrow. This gives the Nazi
extermination campaign against the
Jews a weight and significance that
can scarcely be exaggerated. This
concerns nothing less than Western
culture’s very foundations.”
HUGO VALENTIN, HISTORIAN AND HUMANIST, 1944
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