If “Never Again” Means Something, It Must Go Hand-in-Hand With “Never Forget”

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It also marks 76 years since the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where nearly 1,000,000 Jews, including 200,000 Jewish children, were murdered.

As a person who is active on social media and in writing articles about both Israel and anti-Semitism, I often hear from anti-Semites and Israel-haters (I know, I am being redundant) that Jews “talk too much about the Holocaust.”

Sadly, 40% of Germans agreed with the sentiment that Jews “talk too much about the Holocaust” in a 2019 poll, despite their nation’s role in the mass-murder of a third of the Jews in the world in under five years. And in a 2020 poll of adults under age 40 in the United States, 20% agreed with that same sentiment.

Of course, the reason many Jews talk so “much” about the Holocaust is the same reason most of us have annually re-told the story of our liberation from slavery in Egypt every Passover for the past 3000 plus years.

Because we recognize the importance of remembrance, education and liberation. Because we recognize the truth in the expression that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Because our 3,000-plus years of history have taught most of us the truth contained within the “Vehi Sheamada” passage in our Passover Haggadah, which tells us that “in every generation” an enemy will “rise up against us to destroy us.”

We recognize the truth that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

So, we educate. We remember. We commemorate. We say “never again.” Because we know, sadly all too well, the cost we pay when we forget.

We also know that despite the perception that we talk too much about the Holocaust and the systemic Jew-hatred that made it possible that way too many people are woefully ignorant about the Holocaust.

In the same study where 20% of American adults under age 40 asserted that we Jews “talk too much about the Holocaust,” we learned that over 10% of these American adults think Jews were the cause of the Holocaust. We also learned that nearly half of the people surveyed in this study could not name a single death camp or concentration camp — not even Auschwitz, the concentration camp whose liberation we are commemorating today.

So plainly, we are not “talking about the Holocaust” enough, let alone “too much.”

Today, make sure you are doing something to make sure we never forget. To educate, to commemorate, to remember.

One relatively easy thing you can do is watch a movie about the Holocaust. If you have teenage kids, watch it with them. Some great movies are “Schindler’s List,” “Life is Beautiful,” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” “Defiance,” “Son of Saul,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “Walking With the Enemy” and “The Pianist.” Younger children can watch “The Devil’s Arithmetic.” If you haven’t seen these movies or it has been a long time since you last saw one of them, please watch one (or two). If not today, then this weekend.

And, if you live in a state where Holocaust education is not mandatory, then contact your local legislatures and departments of education and try to make it mandatory.

If “never again” is to mean something, it has to go hand in hand with “never forget.”

#EndJewHatred