Holocaust Remembrance: Learning to civilize man

You can see the photographs from the month-long Holocaust Remembrance project on Tallahassee.com/holocaust, and I hope you will. But that is not enough.

Watch the videos of the survivors, listen to their words and read more about their history on the site, too. It is all so very powerful.

But that is not enough, either.

Get in your car, drive around town to the places pinpointed on our interactive map and view the poster-sized photographs.

And then talk about the Holocaust, the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Nazi regime in Germany. You can do that on our forums and within your families. That is two of every three European Jews who were living at the start of Adolph Hitler’s rule in 1933.

These are things that the human mind can barely comprehend.

Others were targeted for destruction, too, of course: gays, Gypsies, the disabled. But it was the Jew who was blamed for Germany’s worst failings and thus the Jew who Hitler loathed the most.

How much the rest of the world knew and when it knew it has been a matter of scholarly debate. But we know it now, and though this horror can never be undone, it cannot be allowed to simply fade into ancient history.

Man has long been the worst of human beings’ natural predators.

Thus, it is not just the killing of 6 million people that must be remembered, nor even the brutality of the methods of the murders. We must ask why and how, of course; but we must also ask how we can continue to see genocide throughout the world and what we can do to civilize man.

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