Never forget

I know your end,
But fear the stories,
The villains,
The curling humans.

That was my poem of the day today. Morbid, but there's a reason for that. It's Holocaust Remembrance Day, a fact which I was only reminded of yesterday when I glanced at my planner. It disturbs me that such a day could pass with so little notice. The Holocaust: the complete (or whole) burning. From my extremely rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Latin roots, that's what Holocaust means. Six million people of a single religion/race, and millions of other people, were condemned to die for no good reason, other than the pride of a sick, twisted man who gained control over a nation. Last semester, I took a class about the Holocaust. If someone told me that it was what caused my depression, I would deny it only because my depression started before the class. Had I not been depressed going into the course, I would have left depressed. It was an amazing class, full of insights and thoughts that never would have occurred to me. It was also the most somber class I've ever taken, especially the last portion of it, which was about memoirs. I went into the mind of one of Dr. Mengele's assistants, and read the gruesome descriptions of the experiments conducted in concentration camps. I was horrified at the detail Dr. Nyiszli put into them, and disturbed that I could detect passion in this portion of his writing, while his description of those alive in the concentration were both few and removed from himself. I read firsthand accounts of life in the concentration camps. I saw a movie that seemed so honest in its depiction of the cruelties that I almost had to leave the room. I will never forget that class. I could never forget that class. May I never forget why that class is offered today.

Shoah is the Hebrew word used for the Holocaust. According to Wikipedia, it literally means "catastrophic upheaval." So it was. May my heart always be disturbed by the memory of this horror, and may I never shut myself off from the tragedies in the world around me. There are modern genocides that are strikingly similar to the Holocaust. We must acknowledge them and try to stop them, even if it means our hearts will shatter with the burden of what we find. There must never be a second holocaust.