Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, set by the United Nations in 2005 on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism. Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp complex. When Soviet troops liberated it in 1945, the emaciated survivors who had not been led off into “death marches” greeted them as liberators. In today’s essay, I want to say two things. First, it is essential to remember the Holocaust with sober realism. Second, remembering is a difficult task and something that we have to work at from many angles.
One reason it is important to remember the Holocaust is because it was an event where actual people planned and executed a plan to systematically kill other actual people in an attempt to destroy them based on their Jewish identity. That is the definition of genocide. Someone who was 10 years old when Auschwitz was liberated would be 88 years old today, which is why it is increasingly rare to meet Holocaust survivors. But, over the years, many of us have met survivors and it is always a humbling event to hear their stories. For someone like me, born well after the liberation, meeting survivors prevented me from simply relegating the Holocaust to the past, as a moment in history, and made it a reality that had to factor into my view of people, my view of God, my views of morality, of war, and of human dignity. When photos are posted online of a group of local High School student saluting a swastika made of red plastic beer cups, when that same campus was flooded the next week with anti-Semitic posters, we cannot deny that we have failed to remember the scourge of Nazism and the Holocaust as real history, and not as something one can idealize really or comically. So, yes, it is important to remember the Holocaust, even if we had nothing personal to do with it.
Remembering well is a task that can travel several different directions. One way to remember the Holocaust is to view it within other horrific genocidal movements in history. Last week I heard some representatives of the Acjachemen/Tongva tribes, who once inhabited much of Orange County. Colonial powers systematically decimated their people, at one point killing up to 90% of them as they sought to appropriate the land where most of us live. The city where I grew up, Hampton, VA, was settled in 1609. There was a plaque near my childhood home that showed how Hampton was the “oldest continuous living English settlement in the US.” Just ten years later, in 1619, the first African slaves were brought to the US at a harbor in Hampton called Point Comfort. Other genocidal actions carry names that are familiar to many of us from more recent history: The Genocide in Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, “the Rape of Nanking.” In every case, it was human beings dehumanizing other human beings to eliminate whole peoples. When we view the Holocaust in this way, we have to reckon with genocide as a repeated offense in human history. The point here is not to lose sight of the particularity of the Holocaust, but to keep us from imagining that “we” or “folks like us” could never so something evil like that.
Another way to remember the Holocaust is to view it within the history of anti-Semitism, a long, complex history. Even in the New Testament, we see references to “the Jews” that were internal arguments, speaking to some real tensions between early Jewish Christians and their Jewish communities. A lot of these references were picked up and repeated outside of their original context (which was complicated in itself), and increasingly became justification for blatant anti-Semitism. Good Friday has long been a dangerous day for many Jews, as fanatical Christians unleash anger on them for “killing Jesus.” Some of Martin Luther’s comments were explicitly invoked by Nazis as justification for their crusades against Jews. Today one might hear of “Jewish Space Lasers” or the Rothschild family or White Nationalists chanting that Jews “will not replace us.” Historical memory can be a demonic and harmful thing. The Holocaust was in many ways a culmination of long-brewing anti-Semitism that was pervasive well beyond Germany’s borders.
Finally, I feel the need to say that there is a way of thinking about the aftermath of the Holocaust, not so much about the Holocaust itself, that is important. The horror and reaction to the Holocaust was a driving force behind the establishment of Israel in 1948. However one feels about the political or theological rationale behind this act, I think it is important to consider the perspective of the Palestinians who were displaced and have been systematically maligned by this action. I find it problematic when anyone dismisses the horror of the Holocaust. What is open for conversation, in my mind, is why Palestinians have had to bear the brunt of an attempt to correct that horror. This, too, is a very complex matter and fraught with deeply held convictions on every side (and there are many). I’m sure my attempt to name it has not been adequate, but it is the best I can do. If we remember the Holocaust within the context of oppressed peoples generally, we honor the plight of Palestinians on this day as well.
There are few memorial days that are as complex and historically challenging as today, Holocaust Memorial Day. May God help us to honor it, even with its challenges.
Mark of St. Mark
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