Mordecai's Story
We have been taught to “never forget” the Holocaust. We are now some seventy years removed from this horrible time. And as human nature goes, the further we are removed from events, the more we forget, and the less important it seems. After all, we now live in a world of 24-hour news, and what is today’s “breaking news” is soon forgotten within days.
Being the son of a Holocaust survivor, one lives with this daily and does not have the ability to forget. And although my mother who was born in Germany, lived through Kristallnacht, escaped in the middle of the night to Holland, and lived down the street and knew Anne Frank, she has never spoken of the monstrosities that she encountered during Hitler’s “final solution.” After all of these years, she has remained silent, just as many of the victims were as these atrocities were occuring all around them, refusing to accept that it was happening to them.
Like so many politicians and historians, I would love to be able to pontificate and politicize solutions to human genocide based on the few events that were recounted to me by my mother, one of only a few survivors of her entire family, but the reality is, nothing has changed, and there is no formula to immediately stop human cruelty.
If one thing history has taught us, it is that history repeats itself. Genocide was not limited to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Unfortunately, the concept that people with one ideology want to wipe out a people of a different ideology has persisted since the beginning of time. It happened before Hitler’s Germany, and it has continued on today as well.
Yes, it is important to never forget, but it’s more important to prevent.
There are certainly more questions than answer. Being the son of a Holocaust survivor has taught me to never forget. But I certainly do not have the answers on how to prevent current and further genocide. After all, we are all just human. And unfortunately, part of human nature is to believe and act as if one people are superior to another people.
And regrettably, this type of barbaric behavior undoubtedly will continue into time indefinitely.
Mordecai. Personal Interview. 12 Jun. 2014.
Being the son of a Holocaust survivor, one lives with this daily and does not have the ability to forget. And although my mother who was born in Germany, lived through Kristallnacht, escaped in the middle of the night to Holland, and lived down the street and knew Anne Frank, she has never spoken of the monstrosities that she encountered during Hitler’s “final solution.” After all of these years, she has remained silent, just as many of the victims were as these atrocities were occuring all around them, refusing to accept that it was happening to them.
Like so many politicians and historians, I would love to be able to pontificate and politicize solutions to human genocide based on the few events that were recounted to me by my mother, one of only a few survivors of her entire family, but the reality is, nothing has changed, and there is no formula to immediately stop human cruelty.
If one thing history has taught us, it is that history repeats itself. Genocide was not limited to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Unfortunately, the concept that people with one ideology want to wipe out a people of a different ideology has persisted since the beginning of time. It happened before Hitler’s Germany, and it has continued on today as well.
Yes, it is important to never forget, but it’s more important to prevent.
There are certainly more questions than answer. Being the son of a Holocaust survivor has taught me to never forget. But I certainly do not have the answers on how to prevent current and further genocide. After all, we are all just human. And unfortunately, part of human nature is to believe and act as if one people are superior to another people.
And regrettably, this type of barbaric behavior undoubtedly will continue into time indefinitely.
Mordecai. Personal Interview. 12 Jun. 2014.