Never Forget

I observed the event by watching a tour of the facility on YouTube, and I’ve spent some time reading, thinking and writing about the Holocaust over the past five years.  For those of you that want to learn more, I highly recommend The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees.  Rees meticulously researched this horrific stain on humanity and was able to access sources heretofore unavailable from the Eastern Bloc countries.  In film, Son of Saul captured the life of man that worked a sondercommando at Auschwitz and is a fine film. 

But the most provocative and relevant film was Austerlitz, a documentary that did not get wide distribution and is available for rental for $5 on Vimeo.  The film shows visitors at Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/21/austerlitz-review-holocaust-tourism-documentary-sergei-loznitsa).  What strikes one about the film is the irreverence with which young people act while touring these places, sometimes laughing and joking as they walk through.  It is a most relevant film today and made me realize that we are forgetting.

As the survivors of the Holocaust dwindle, along with the survivors of the Stalin terrors, the horrors of fascism and Communism are fading rapidly.

We are seeing it play out every day.  Anti-semites are not only out in the open but run rampant on college campuses and now grace the halls of Congress.  The Democratic party couldn’t even censure Ilhan Omar for her anti-semitic comments and just this week Rashida Tlaib spread blood libel, with no consequences from her fellow Democrats (https://www.timesofisrael.com/tlaib-deletes-retweet-claiming-settlers-killed-boy-found-dead-in-rain-filled-pit/).  Jews have been openly beaten in the Bronx and an attack on Jews left one man brain damaged. 

75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the darkness of anti-semitism has rebounded.

But its ugly twin, Communism has also made a comeback.  Not to dilute the commemoration of the liberation of Holocaust, it is also appropriate to talk about remembering the horrors of Stalinism. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the apologists for the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela are dangerously close to seizing executive power in the U.S.  Bernie Sanders, backed by The Squad is now leading in Iowa and has a sizable base.  Now more than 50% of young people prefer socialism to capitalism.

This reality became apparent to me a couple of years ago when I attended the funeral of the mother of one of my oldest friends.  His father had passed a couple of years before.  He was a Ukrainian immigrant .  During the Stalin terrors, the Russians shot one of his friends in the head in front of his eyes.  He went into hiding and for a time, fought in the insurgency against the Russians that were systematically murdering the Ukrainians.   My friend’s father eventually fled and came to the U.S. after being hunted by the Communists.

At the reception following his mother’s funeral, I learned that all of the grandchildren were Bernie Sanders supporters.  I held back the urge to scream, “Do you realized that your grandfather was hunted like an animal by these people?”

It is clear to me that as the Holocaust survivors dwindle,  “Never Again” is becoming a historic relic to a lot of American Jews, especially young Jews.  Likewise, as the survivors of the Stalin terrors die off, the horrors of Communism fade away as the voices that experienced it grow silent.

Virulent anti-semitism and Communism have different faces today.  But if you don't recognize them in Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, you aren't paying attention to the fading voices.