Holocaust Rememberance

Holocaust Remembrance Day. A day that marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp near Krakow, Poland in what was then the Greater German Reich.

We must remember the tragedy in order to remind us of the depths of deprivation humans as individuals and as packs can reach. Even the Holocaust deniers must remind us, for in order to frame their arguments, they must first mention the unspeakable horrors of the camps.

But why must we remember? The easy answer is to say “so that we do not repeat such horrors”. The easy answer, however, is not satisfactory.

The Holocaust did not start with the death camps. The death camps were an ongoing escalation of systematic, state-sponsored racism and exceptionalism, a system driven by the government and the governed. Before the gas chambers, hard labor, and death marches there were the ghettos.

When I very young, I only knew the “ghetto” as where the black people lived. I’m not sure how the term migrated from the Jewish quarters of Europe to the inner cities of the United States, but the term is appropriate. A ghetto is a portion of a city where “undesirable” populations live in squalid conditions, forced to live there by regulatory or economic pressures. From the Jews in Europe to the people of color -- blacks and Hispanics -- in the United States as well as the indigenous Aboriginals of Australia and Maori of New Zealand; they all live in their own poor ghettos, separated from the rest of the population.

These patterns continue from the ghetto to prison. The Jews were sent from the ghettos all over Europe to the death camps. In the United States, people of color account for a disproportionate number of inmates. In New Zealand, the Maori make up half of the prison population. Also like the camps in Nazi Germany, violence is a very real factor in prisons in Russia and the United States. Worse yet, in the United States, prisoners are executed. In six US states, the gas chamber is still a possible form of execution! There have been well over one thousand executions in the United States since the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

The systematic racism filling the prisons in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, the blind hatred fueling the violence in American and Russian prisons, and the self-righteousness continuing the state-sponsored executions do not compare with Nazi Germany in scale, but parallel the depravity of the Third Reich in deed.

Remembering the Holocaust is not enough. We cannot simply point a finger at Germany and say “bad Nazis”. We as individuals, as neighbors, as a folk, as a worldwide community must evolve beyond racism, nationalism, jingoism and exceptionalism. In that way can we begin to prevent such atrocities from happening again.