Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust

#NeverForgetTheHolocaust

The Butterfly
The last, the very last, 

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. 

Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing against a white stone… Such, such a yellow 

Is carried lightly ‘way up high. It went away, I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye. 

For seven weeks I've lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto. 

But I have found my people here. The dandelions call to me And the.

white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live in here, In the ghetto. Pavel Friedmann 4.6.1942.

Joshua M. Greene

Opinion echo published in the Capital Gazette, a Maryland newspaper.

The further the Holocaust recedes into history, the more we witness a dangerous trend toward substituting generic commemoration for the specifics of what occurred. A lighting of candles, a recitation of names and a promise to never forget are the staples of Days of Remembrance commemorations during Yom HaShoah.

What exactly we should never forget is not always explained, and this drift away from the details has taken its toll.

According to a survey conducted in 2020 by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, nearly two-thirds of Americans between 18 and 39 do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

The tendency to oversimplify the Holocaust was driven home for me recently when a community group called for advice on a film they wanted to produce about survivors living near us on Long Island. They submitted a promotional flier about their project, which read, "These men and women are heroes who embody all that is noble in the human spirit. Their will to survive is an inspiration to us all."

Time out. Are we to assume that the 6 million Jews who did not survive lacked “human spirit” and were bereft of “the will to survive”? In 30 years of research, I’ve screened perhaps 200 hours of survivors’ video testimony, and I cannot recall any of them ever describing themselves as heroes. The Long Island filmmakers were not trying to revise or sanitize Holocaust history, they were simply unaware of how easy it is to propagate inaccuracies.

It is an understandable temptation. After all, who wants to dwell on, or even be exposed to, unspeakable atrocities? Yet without dedicating at least some time to a candid and unedited examination of what happened, Holocaust commemorations risk perpetuating sanitized impressions that, in the extreme, might fuel denial: It couldn't have been so bad. Look at the heroes who survived. They built the state of Israel, they started new family lines, they have a good life — how bad could it have been?

The need for an overhaul of Holocaust remembrance is not only a matter of getting history right but of preventing its repetition. There are substantial issues that deserve inclusion in commemorations, many of them relevant to recent events, such as the inflammatory power of demagogues to radicalize an entire population, the misuse of media as propaganda and the depths of depravity to which humans can fall when fueled by fear and anger — and most troubling, the steady increase in anti-Semitism.

This week is Holocaust Remembrance Week. In addition to lighting candles consider including the testimony of a survivor in how you “never forget.” For example, dig into the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. The interviews reveal ordinary men and women, constrained by circumstances, and the unheroic things they did to stay alive.

"One night I was so hungry," a woman, Hanna F., remembers, "I couldn't sleep…. I stole that piece of bread [from my bunkmate]. I never admitted it. I was very sorry, because I was hungry and she was hungry … but there was no solution [because] you got diarrhea [anyway and] that was the end. So this wasn't good and that wasn't good: So what choice did we have?"

When we can grasp that nightmares are as critical to our understanding of history as bravery and self-sacrifice, we will have made a significant step toward Holocaust remembrance.

The Holocaust is not ancient history. The same poisons of racism and anti-Semitism that led to the mass murder of millions are at work today, just below the surface of American life. The danger of its recurrence in the future can be mitigated, but only if we enhance our understanding of what occurred in the past.

Joshua M. Greene is an opinion writer for the Los Angeles Times. This column was distributed by Tribune News Service.