Holocaust Why it Is Vital

¶ … Holocaust [...] why it is vital that the remembrance, history, and lessons of the Holocaust be passed to a new generation, and what students can do to combat and prevent prejudice, discrimination, and violence in the world today. We must pass the lessons of the Holocaust to a new generation to keep the victims alive in our memories, and to ensure that anything so evil can never occur again.

People are beginning to forget the tragic lessons of the Holocaust, and that is a disaster of horrific implication. We must not forget the Holocaust, because allowing the memory of the event to die is in effect killing the millions of victims all over again. Each generation must learn the lesson of the Holocaust and pass it on to succeeding generations. Otherwise, the stories, memories, and experiences of the Holocaust will not remain fresh in the minds of the people, and it will gradually lessen in its importance.

First, students need to know the origin of the word. Editors at the United States Holocaust Museum write, "Holocaust' is a word of Greek origin meaning 'sacrifice by fire'" (Editors), and that fits the situation perfectly. Millions of Jews were herded to their deaths in giant crematoriums created expressly for the purpose of systematically exterminating an entire race. Students need to understand this, and the origins of the word bring new meaning to the entire event. Once students understand just what happened, and the incredible slaughter of children, women, and men, they can begin to understand the magnitude and importance of the event. They also need to listen to some of the voices of survivors of the Holocaust, so they can understand what they lived through and how it has affected their lives.

Thousands of survivors live with memories they can never forget, and the world should never forget these images, either. One survivor remembers, "The Nazi murderers couldn't burn all the bodies in the crematoriums - they weren't big enough. They quickly came up with a solution. They burned the bodies in pits. And this went on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for years" (Weinberger 61). Another remembers his first view of Auschwitz. He writes, "I saw a large quadrangle, surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, perhaps ten feet high. Machine gun towers were manned by helmeted SS. We approached a gate house with a tall double gate made of steel. One of these bore the legend: arbeit macht frei, Work Makes Free" (Blum 50). Another remembers a young girl on a forced march whose shoes kept falling off her feet. He writes, "Unfortunately, her wooden shoes kept falling off. When I tried to tie them on again, the German guard asked me what I was doing. I tried to explain to him that her shoes were falling off. He shoved the girl into a ditch and shot her" (Berkowitz 101). All of these horrifying memories are still vivid to the survivors, and they should be vivid to each generation in turn. To truly understand the horror of the Holocaust, we only need to read a few memories such as this. They should not be packed away like yesterday's fashions. They should be brought out repeatedly, so they never, ever, are forgotten.

The Jews did attempt to fight back, even though we do not hear about that very much. One resistance fighter was Anna Heilman, who helped smuggle minute amounts of gunpowder out of a plant at Auschwitz to help create a bomb to destroy one of the crematoriums at the concentration camp. She remembers, "We smuggled the gunpowder from the factory into the camp. It was smuggled in tiny little pieces of cloth, tied up with a string. Inside our dresses we had what we called a little boit'l (small sack), a pocket, and the boit'l was where everybody hid their little treasures, wrapped in pieces of cloth" (Rittner and Roth 132). The Nazis never noticed the smuggling, and the bomb was a success, a crematorium was destroyed shortly before the end of the war.