The Holocaust remains the epitome of man's indifference and his lust for scapegoating. One has only to read the works of William Shirer or Albert Speer to begin to understand the depravity. I am far from a scholar on the subject, but from my reading two quotes standout:
From noted author Rod Serling:
All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the grave diggers.
From General Omar Bradley:
The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. ... Eisenhower's face whitened into a mask. Patton walked over to a corner and sickened. I was too revolted to speak. For here death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us.
It took the Greatest Generation to rid the world of such horror, but now, only two generations removed from those atrocities, we see an uptick of antisemitism. Our children have succumbed to the propaganda machines of persecution and violence, seeing the world through rose-colored glasses that shade the terror and evil.
The Holocaust remains the epitome of man's indifference and his lust for scapegoating. One has only to read the works of William Shirer or Albert Speer to begin to understand the depravity. I am far from a scholar on the subject, but from my reading two quotes standout:
From noted author Rod Serling:
All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the grave diggers.
From General Omar Bradley:
The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. ... Eisenhower's face whitened into a mask. Patton walked over to a corner and sickened. I was too revolted to speak. For here death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us.
It took the Greatest Generation to rid the world of such horror, but now, only two generations removed from those atrocities, we see an uptick of antisemitism. Our children have succumbed to the propaganda machines of persecution and violence, seeing the world through rose-colored glasses that shade the terror and evil.
Thank you for this essay.
I was honored to attend. I still have more pictures and observations to post here by Friday. Please stay on the lookout for that!