Telling the story

Editorial

How can we commemorate the Holocaust, that pitch-black chapter in history, beyond the scope of human understanding?

The evil human beings perpetrated, in murdering millions of innocents and laying communities to waste, remains unfathomable. Nearly 60 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany, we are still coming to grips with its crimes against humanity.

But we have no choice. We must remember. We must recount.

Elie Wiesel teaches that we are all storytellers. In order to relate the story ourselves, it is valuable to learn from those who experienced the story firsthand. This task has become all the more pressing, as fewer and fewer survivors are alive to share their experiences.

Efforts abound to document their memories.

Throughout the year, survivors demonstrate courage by meeting with strangers to share their experiences.

Scottsdale resident Robert Sutz makes masks of survivors, to preserve part of their memory and legacy.

Stephen Spielberg's Shoah Foundation has interviewed thousands of survivors, safeguarding their testimony as a permanent record.

We construct museums and monuments. Every state legislature officially recognizes Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The commemoration of Yom Hashoah in the synagogue is an evolving process. There are candlelight vigils and memorial services. There is specially commissioned music. There are Yom Yashoah seders. The Reform and Conservative movements each have written a new liturgy, respectively "Six Days of Destruction" in 1988, and "Megillat Hashoah, the Shoah Scroll" in 2004.

This year Yom Hashoah begins at sundown April 17. Rather than remembering what we lost privately or alone, we have many opportunities to do so with members of our community (see "Local Yom Hashoah commemorations" on page 12).

Additionally, while the Holocaust decimated the Jewish people, we must resist the temptation to view it exclusively as our tragedy and instead understand and explain it as a human tragedy. The Nazis and their co-conspirators slaughtered Jews, Slavs, gypsies, the handicapped, Catholics and homosexuals, among many others. Genocides continue, in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Sudan.

In becoming storytellers, we take on the responsibility for helping to prevent such tragedy from happening again. We have much work to do, for sadly, pitifully, human beings have yet to master the lessons of the Holocaust.

In becoming storytellers, we enrich the repositories of collective memory, and we become a living reminder of the work we all can and must do to prevent the Holocaust - any Holocaust - from happening again.

Home