The pictures from the Charlottesville violence this past summer have been seared into everyone’s minds. People flying Confederate and Nazi flags openly without any shame, counter-protesters being mowed down by cars, chants laden with white supremacist rhetoric. And what was perhaps the most damning was the President of the United States likening these neo-Nazi thugs with those fundamentally against their fascist views?
After trying to process what transpired in Charlottesville, and also trying to fathom how people I know have actually defended these Nazis, I went and visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb just north of Chicago. Skokie, a predominantly Jewish town, itself had a similar situation and debate like Charlottesville in 1978 when neo-Nazis marched down the streets that ultimately led to a Supreme Court case in favor of the neo-Nazis.
From my time at the museum, I heard so many memories from Holocaust survivors, some so graphic that I could not even fathom that something so evil could have happened. I walked in a dusty railcar used to transport Jews to concentration camps. I saw some of the cancerous propaganda perpetuated by the Nazis.
One of the things I learned from my visit to the museum was that Adolf Hitler succeeded because he relied on the ignorance, manipulation, and complacency of his people. He put his ideology on a moral plain and portrayed his hateful beliefs as the censored truth, which is how he rose to power.
Fast forward, about eight months later to now. As I write this, Yom HaShoah has just passed, a day to remember the over six million Jews that perished in the Holocaust. The events that unfolded during that tragic event in history should never be forgotten.
But the problem is that Americans are.
A new survey showed that 40% of Millennials could not recall one concentration camp from the Holocaust, and moreover 41% of all Americans believe that less than 2 million Jews died during it.
In a world where Nazism is slowly relapsing and normalizing in the public sphere, it is now critical than ever to never forget the horrendous recollections of the Holocaust. If we fail to remember something so evil that it was devised straight from the pits of hell, then we become naïve enough to let similar events build up again.
We have a president who has seemed to make clear he sympathizes with Nazis during Charlottesville. France nearly came close to electing a woman who comes from a party where Holocaust denial is the norm. Even here in Illinois, a Holocaust denier is running unopposed for a seat in Congress. These things don’t happen spontaneously. They are part of a broader trend of ignorance on the history that should be recited from memory easily.
The takeaway from this article should be this: educate yourself on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. If there’s a Holocaust museum near you, take the time to visit and see that the Holocaust is more than just a vocab word you were forced to memorize in history class. Listen to the firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and the hell on earth that they were forced to endure. Speak out against hate when you see it, even when it might not seem like the right time.
It is up to us to make sure that hate in any capacity prevails once again into something so maniacal as genocide.
As the phrase goes: “Never Again.” Never again, indeed.
