Never Again?

I recently visited Barnes and Noble to peruse some new reading material.  I have a bit of a "problem" when it comes to reading, and left with six books.  Two of them, I had in mind when I walked in, the other four I spotted on various tables and couldn't leave without.  I love reading, getting sucked into another world, and forming relationships with the characters.  A good book is entertaining, a great book makes you feel.  And some books, they can ignite a fire in you.  The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris, is one of those books.

I, like most American High Schoolers, learned about the Holocaust during one of my Social Studies classes.  The sad truth is I couldn't tell you what year, or what the course even covered.  I don't feel that most children that age are yet capable of really understanding or processing the gravity of what occurred during that horrifying time.  I wasn't.  After I graduated undergrad, I worked as a long term substitute assistant teacher in a Social Studies class.  The teacher taught a 3 week lesson on the Holocaust each year.  It was then, at 22 or 23 years old, the I really learned and processed what happened.  I was floored.  I developed a slight obsession with learning all I could, reading every book I could get my hands on, in a failed attempt to understand how the Holocaust could have happened.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz kind of reignited that fire.  I cried so many times reading it.  I cried giving a synopsis of it to some of my employees.  I'm trying not to cry right now as I type this.  To read personal stories of real survivors, to read their horror of not only their bleak situation, but of how stunned they were when children, babies, started coming to the camps - I can't even put emotion into words.  I won't even try.  It is truly unfathomable. My purpose for even writing an entry on this, is the fact that after it was over, after the survivors went home, there was a general "Never Again" credo.  We can never again let something like this occur, except we have.  Hugo Schiller, a Holocaust survivor living in Florida says this:

"We haven't learned very much.  And certainly we have had our Rwanda's after this where people were killed just because of who they are...There's always hope but so far we haven't evolved since the time of the Holocaust."

Other survivors wonder what will happen when there are no survivors left to tell their stories. A recent study has these horrible findings:

• 66% of millennials did not know what Auschwitz was.
• 11% of US adults and 22% of millennials said they either hadn't heard of or were not sure whether they had heard of the Holocaust.
• 31% of adults and 41% of millennials believe — incorrectly — that 2 million Jews or fewer were killed during the Holocaust. The number most frequently cited is 6 million, but the actual number is almost certainly higher.
• While 84% of adults knew the Holocaust happened in Germany, only 37% knew it occurred in Poland, only 6% knew it occurred in Latvia, and only 5% knew it occurred in Estonia and Lithuania. 

Right now my children are too young to learn about the holocaust, so I'm not sure what the school lessons are like, what they cover, what they don't.  What I do know, is that if 66% of millennials don't even know what Auschwitz was, then it's not enough.  I'm not going to put it all on the schools either.  Parents have an obligation to raise their children to be aware, be kind, and to do what is RIGHT.  How can the future generations stop something terrible form happening again if they are unaware that it even happened in the first place?  The survivors will one day be gone, but their stories need to be told.  Forever.  Children are not born bigots.  They are not born racist.  They are not born assholes.  They learn it.  They learn it from their parents.  If you are a parent that says your kid learned it from "a friend" or "at school" or "on tv", than you are still failing at not correcting those behaviors and shortcomings.  We have to do better.  Let the Holocaust, in all its unnecessary violence and hatred, be a lesson that we can learn and grow from.  Stop hating people simply for what they are. Please, do better for your children, and our children's children.  Do better.