Eighty years ago, the world learned what true depravity looks like. As the war in Europe neared its end, Allied troops forced the Germans to retreat from previously held territory. What the Allied troops found was the thing of nightmares. The names were etched into the memories of not only that generation but of the following generations: Treblinka, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and, probably the most infamous, Auschwitz. Millions of Jews and other “undesireables” died in these camps. Now, we must ask ourselves a simple question: after 80 years, have we forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust?

As Allied troops closed in, the Nazis did their best to erase the evidence of the camps’ existence and, the process, those held in them as well. Auschwitz was no exception. Orders had been given. On or about January 17, 1945, Nazi guards selected prisoners for a forced march to other camps. The rest were to be killed, their bodies and the camp destroyed. Unfortunately for the Nazis, that plan failed (for the most part) and on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops arrived and liberated Auschwitz, giving the world a first-hand look at what true evil looks like.

Eighty years.

A lifetime for some and an eternity for others.

As news of the camps reached the West, so did the rallying cry of “Never forget!”.

Sir Keir Starmer, in a post earlier today, summed up not only the emotional impact of the Holocaust but our duty to make sure nothing like it ever happens again when he writes about his recent visit to Auschwitz. In describing the impact of seeing a photo of a Nazi guard smiling as he stood among a number of Jewish prisoners, he said:

I’ll never forget how I felt at that moment. It illustrated to me, more powerfully than ever before, how the Holocaust was not simply the evil deeds of a few bad individuals forcing others to do unspeakable things.

It was a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary people who were consumed by the hatred of difference, each playing their part in the dehumanisation and attempted destruction of an entire people.

We must never forget.

Yet, as we approach Monday’s remembrance ceremony in Auschwitz, we must accept that those who lived that time, those survivors who walked through Hell and have served as a reminder of those unimaginable horrors, are not just aging. They are dying. A mere 50 survivors are expected to attend. Even so, the 1,000 or so survivors still living refuse to be silenced. Like many of those who died before them, they speak out, they tell their stories, they have worked with the Shoah Foundation and other organizations to memorialize their stories. . .SO WE NEVER FORGET.

Eighty years ago, we saw the consequences of intolerance.

We saw the consequences of hate.

We were told to never forget.

Yet there are many, too many, who have not taken that warning to heart. On both sides of the political aisle, hatred and intolerance lives. We see it in the posts of people hoping President Trump doesn’t live out his term. We see it in the demands for the US to return to the isolationist policies that caused so many issues early in the 20th century. We see it in the call by a US Congressman for Bishop Mariann Budde to be placed on a deportation list for asking President Trump to have compassion on illigal immigrants, members of the LGBTQ+ community, etc. Budde was born in New Jersey, yet there is a member of our government who would have her citizenship stripped and her thrown out of the country simply because she said something he did not agree with politically.

WE MUST NEVER FORGET . . . except when it serves our personal agenda.

It is too easy to fall into that trap. If you look at history, Germany and its leaders had “the best of intentions”. Hitler and his ilk wanted to protect their country, their race (irony much here, considering how Hitler was about as far from the Aryan ideal as he could be), their rights. Sound familiar? It’s the same sort of rhetoric we’re hearing from both sides of the aisle right now–not from all of them, just from the outliers who also happen to be the loudest.

Each of us should listen to the ceremonies Monday. There won’t be a single politician speaking. That was a choice the organizers made because:

[P]eople are tired of these speeches by officials, functionaries, politicians,” said Yves Kugelmann, the Switzerland-based editor in chief of Aufbau, a magazine started by German-speaking Jewish emigres in 1934. Its newest edition is dedicated to the subject of Auschwitz and memory, and includes contributions by survivors.

“It is important that we have the witnesses talking about what they experienced,” Kugelmann said.

Remember what happened in the Holocaust.

Remember the peoples who were targeted and killed: the Jews, the infirm, the mentally ill, the gay, the Romani, and all the others.

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered.”–Simon Wiesenthal

Never forget.

NEVER FORGET.

NEVER FORGET.

(Featured Image: Auschwitz gas chamber by Jason M. Ramos. Creative Commons 2.0 license.)