Zachor, Remember! -- but What? and How?

Zachor, Remember! -- But What? And How?

By Jeanette Friedman

Introduction

As someone who has been involved in Holocaust Education for more than 25 years, and as a daughter of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen survivors who was born in Brooklyn, NY, the only perspective I can offer is one from continued study and my own personal experience, most of it in the United States. I am familiar with materials that are used in suburban public high schools and in some Jewish private schools. I served as Education Coordinator for the then International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and as a Second Generation Education Liaison to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. I also served as a member of the [Arthur] Goldberg Commission to Examine the Role of American Jews During the Holocaust, which proved to be a valuable experience in determining some of the directions that Holocaust Education needed to take. This took place between the years 1972 and 1985.

I realize that Europe is not the United States. On the other hand, we live in a global society, and young people share many, many ideas and attitudes and characteristics, no matter where they live. We also now have media and communication tools we never had at our disposal before, which should make us evaluate how we teach the Holocaust—what are its lessons, and are they true to the legacy the survivors want to leave behind?

Below is an examination of what the survivors wanted to accomplish and what they have accomplished. In some areas they succeeded admirably, particularly in the public arena and at the university level. On the other hand, what is happening in secular and Jewish high school classrooms is another story altogether—and depending on who is teaching and how, results will vary. In the best case scenario, the result is character development of a young person into a decent, caring human being. In the worst, Holocaust education becomes a tool that creates disdain for Jewish people, ramps up the Victim Olympics, and creates the opposite of what it was supposed to do—old fashioned antisemitism and self-hatred with a modern twist.

Tempus Fugit —The Survivors Are Running Out oF Time

Madonna has a hit song that begins with the sound of a clock ticking. As the ticking continues to impose itself her voice chimes in: “Time goes by, so slowly, so slowly, so slowly.” Maybe for some, but not for everyone—time is passing like a runway train for Holocaust survivors and they worry that their legacy will be forgotten. Every day another personal connection to the past that so shaped our present and linked us to the seminal event of our age, to our murdered families and Yiddishkeit—our Yiddish culture, not our Judaism—is broken. And the time goes by so quickly, so quickly…so quickly.

A conscientious person can spend every day, all day, paying respects at funerals and making shiva calls on Holocaust survivor families. It is a wrenching experience, made more difficult by

1 knowing that the lessons from those who are passing—from the Judaism of their childhoods, to the terror of the Holocaust, to the lives they rebuilt and gave us—are far from learned. In fact, in some places there is already erosion, misinterpretation, trivialization, and perhaps, worst of all, exploitation of the Holocaust as a means of raising funds for causes that have nothing to do with the Holocaust or for political purposes to create a siege mentality.

It is a desecration to the Six Million that the aging and often ailing survivors find hard to swallow—along with their prohibitively expensive medical care. And every day the news gets worse and the survivors ask, “Is this why we survived?”

From the first activist days of the Holocaust Education movement, which began in the 1970’s— though the historians were tackling the “academic” issues like statistics and causes before that— the Holocaust survivors, who had pledged to bear witness, knew that the story had to be told. It began with commemorations in communities of survivors who wanted to say Kaddish for their families, and that were basically ignored by the rest of the Jewish community. There were memoirs and books before, but no formal Holocaust education until the 1970s, when the sons and daughters of the survivors realized it was a subject that simply never came up, except at home.

Rarely was the Holocaust taught in any school system, not Jewish, not secular, unless it was somehow mentioned in a history course on the college level. There was little or nothing for people to use in high school classrooms, and the event was not on anyone’s radar. There were certainly no statewide or national observances or commemorations. The Holocaust that so affected the Jews was not even a blip on the education radar screen, even in their own Jewish schools.

Instead, in English literature courses in some schools, like in the Orthodox Beth Jacob School in Brooklyn, in the 60’s, students were assigned to read Elie Wiesel’s Night or The Diary of Anne Frank, two classics that remain the two most important works that influence young students. But very few educators tackled the subject itself because it raised too many theological questions they couldn’t handle; the event was too raw; and the lessons of the Holocaust hadn’t yet been figured out. In secular classrooms, it wasn’t even an issue.

That changed when a television program aired in the United States. It was called Holocaust, produced by Gerald Green, and it was a frankly melodramatic interpretation of a fictional/realistic version of Holocaust stories called a docudrama.

As a result, Holocaust deniers picketed the studios of the network, and the Holocaust survivors, their families and their allies realized that they needed to wake up the world to the story of the past. A movement to teach about the Holocaust was born, and with the self-empowerment of the survivors, the publishing of memoirs and the gathering of facts by historians, Holocaust education began to take shape. One of the first courses to be taught in the United States was the course given by Dr. Yaffa Eliach in Brooklyn College in 1972, where the class—mostly sons and daughters of survivors—were asked to go home and collect their parents’ testimonies.

The result was an examination of the notion of “going like sheep to the slaughter,” which in turn

2 led to a discussion of collective responsibility and some philosophical discussion.

Did it lead to action or character development? Judging by the students, it was hard to tell. On the other hand, Dr. Eliach developed the Center for Holocaust Studies. As a result, she collected the raw material that later enabled the designers of the Us Holocaust Memorial Museum to build the Tower of Faces (known to most as the Tower of Eishishok) because she realized was important to remember individuals, actual people, not corpses or statistics. Her resources and materials were eventually absorbed by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown New York. In the meantime, the Judaic Studies Department, created at the same time the class was first taught at Brooklyn College, featured scholars like Dr. Henry Friedlander and others.

At first, then, everything was done at the university level. The Graduate Center of the City University presented a series of lectures by top scholars—some of whom were also survivors. Lecturers included Professors Yehuda Bauer, Henry Friedlander, Henry Feingold, Randolph Braham, Raul Hillberg, Eric Goldhagen—stellar researchers into facts and statistics, and it was all about the PROCESS of killing six million Jews, from the Einzatsgruppen to the gas chambers, and about political history and power. These lectures were free and open to the public. They were mostly attended by Holocaust survivors, sons and daughters of survivors, and history majors.

This was something that took place after the survivors assembled in Israel at the World Gathering in 1981, and again at the American Gathering in Washington in 1983. These widely covered events empowered the survivors by using Holocaust education to galvanize governments into recognizing their responsibilities.

Therefore you might say the first stage of Holocaust Education was “public education” for the public service sector. This resulted in the nationalization of the recognition of the Holocaust. That means that while in 1960, there were a handful of Holocaust commemorations, on Yom HaShoah in 2007, the Holocaust is remembered on a day that commemorates the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from sea to shining sea in the U.S. --as well as in cities and hamlets around the world. In synagogues and churches, on Capitol Hill and in state capitals and city hall, scholars and universities in virtually every state of the Union, commemorations are held annually. This “public education” also resulted in the creation of public institutions to teach the Holocaust: the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the memorial in Berlin, and hundreds of smaller resource centers and memorials around the world. Of course, the largest and most important of these repositories of information, testimony, history and memorialization is at Yad Vashem in Israel.

“Public education” – and a strong dose of Iranian Holocaust denial -- also resulted in the United Nations, more than 60 years after the fact, finally formalizing commemoration and remembrance of the Holocaust on January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated. Another result of this “public education” was that Holocaust denial was condemned by the UN’s member nations (though 92 nations did not approve the resolution), which was sponsored by the United States and Rwanda, earlier this year; and previously Holocaust denial was outlawed in a number of countries, including Germany, Canada and Austria. Now such a resolution is also pending at the European

Union and is being considered in Central European countries.

What this means is that on one level, at least, on the governmental level, the political lessons were absorbed and the Holocaust is publicly remembered—and some lip service is paid to some lessons from the past—that people must not stand idly by their brother’s blood, that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and so forth. This type of Holocaust education manifests itself whenever people stand up to stop a genocide—whether it is going to rallies to protest the genocide in Darfur, or, as in the past, asking President Clinton to step in and stop the genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo that raged for years. (Yes, we know, the International Courts in The Hague didn’t want to call it genocide, though the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo had all the earmarks of one and Milosevic got away with it!)

Another result of this “public education” is that state, federal and local governments are now funding Holocaust education for classrooms at every level, and in some cases, legislating against hate crimes. This can be considered one of Holocaust Education’s successes. Holocaust Education is a mandatory subject that must be taught in twenty two states, including the state of New Jersey (where I live). These mandated courses are also problematical, especially if schools only meet minimal requirements—one school district still had to be sued in order to do the “right thing.”

A case in point: New Milford High School, New Jersey was mandated to teach Holocaust Studies. They did not. They assigned the reading of The Diary of Anne Frank, and told the class the document was a false one.

Racial epithets against different ethnic groups appeared on bathroom walls and in the hallways. Ethnic groups fought with each other in the schoolyard and at school dances. And one Jewish student was singled out—a cartoon of his face painted on a bathroom stall with a swastika marking his forehead. In social studies class, a student told him he was going to Hell because he killed Jesus, and the next day he was blocked from entering his classroom when a student of color blocked his passage and cracked, “No Jews Allowed.”

By this time, the school had improved their Holocaust Education program: They had students get their parents give them permission to watch a showing of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The result was that the same student of color who told the Jew he wasn’t allowed in the classroom, also told him that the Holocaust was a lie concocted by the Jews so that they would have “something to bitch about.”

This reaction to Holocaust Education and the Six Million may not have been typical. But what was extreme was the principal’s reaction. He told the student’s parent that the Holocaust was a matter of opinion, and that of course, the Jews killed Jesus—didn’t she know what was written on the Cross? None of the proper procedures for such racial harassment were followed until a suit was filed with the local police department, the Office of Equal Opportunity of the Federal government and an attorney. As a result, the school, which kept asking if Holocaust Education was what the parents wanted in order to settle the suit, instead was forced to adopt the above mentioned Character Counts Program from pre-K through faculty. The Character Counts program changed the nature of the students, and made them more caring and respectful of

4 others—beginning in the lower grades, with lessons that made a difference in the content of the child’s character.

No one denies that the subject is problematical and is treated with reticence. Why should anyone in a secular middle class middle-school or high school care about Six Million dead Jews and the evil that was done to them? There are so many other things that need to be taught, and there is a dearth of material that is effective and time-sensitive that can be used.

Most of the films are old and of poor quality. And they don’t resonate with a personal connection. For example, one of the shortest films about the Holocaust is Nacht und Nebel, Night and Fog, a 28-minute documentary about the deportations and the camps by Alain Resnais. When teachers choose this film because of the length, they are not prepared for the consequences of showing atrocities to students.

Holocaust educators learned this through bitter experience. Showing the film to unprepared audiences left them in shock. They were not able to discuss what they saw on the screen, let alone absorb it. We learned that there needed to be serious discussion about what they were going to see and why they were going to see it. They needed to have advance warning about the strength of the material, and only then could they see with different eyes and discuss what they had since afterward.

Other audio-visual materials were either too long—like Claude Landsman’s Shoah—or of very poor quality. Today, however, resources are available from organizations like Teacher’s Discovery, which has a catalogue that includes material for the classroom on Holocaust and Genocide Studies that feature items that are above average.

The real question is, How do you make students care? When you teach students the statistics of history, to those who have no vested interest in the Holocaust, like the descendants of Holocaust survivors do, it becomes very boring after a while, especially when it sounds like someone is teaching the victimology of the Jews. Because when the Holocaust is taught as victimology to other ethnic groups without recognizing their history, students become desensitized and resentful, or worse.

And the truth is, the kids are, in some ways correct. Because it is not about statistics of Six Million Jews and the process of killing that is important. It about what happens when kids don’t care and do stand idly by their brother’s and sister’s blood—whether it is during schoolyard fight between bullies and gang members, or whether it is about letting others tell “big lies” about other people to destroy them. They need to learn about scapegoating and why people become victims. One of the better books on Jewish history is “The Unity Principle” by Dr. Ellis Rivkin, a noted historian. The chapter, the Road to Auschwitz, is a seminal work that describes what really happened politically and economically to the Jews.

We have discovered that best way to reach those resistant students (who snicker at scenes in Schindler’s List and view it as an amusement) is with the stories that the Holocaust survivors tell themselves—in person if possible, and in video if not, especially if they tell stories of what it was like before the discrimination and killing began and how they felt as children and teens. And

5 when the story comes from an old lady or old man standing in front of the classroom, speaking with a funny accent and telling students the story of what happened to them—without digressing and telling the history of World War II—by telling their personal stories, it does have a positive effect on the students. The most effective team of survivors speaking to groups in schools was David Gewirtzman, a Holocaust survivor, who teamed up with Jacqueline Murekatete, a young Rwandan girl who survived the genocide there. ( http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/jan- june04/genocide_04-09-04.html ) Together they speak to their audiences from the heart. Though half a century and half a planet divided them, their stories are the same, and students begin to see and hear the message more clearly, for as they both stress, it took good people to make the difference. Good people, in the midst of Hell, saved their lives. Someone decided not to stand idly by.

One Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weismann Story, which won an Academy Award and an Emmy has now been distributed, along with its admirable study kit and teacher’s guide, by the Southern Poverty Law Center to almost 100,000 teachers for free. The 38 minute film will be used in classrooms and should prove effective because it personalizes the larger story using the images and experiences of one survivor

For the survivors, in addition to remembering, the first lesson of the Holocaust is that we have to be better people—and that means we have a responsibility to hardwire the kids to care about others—and by the time they get to high school and learn about the Holocaust, it is often too little, too late, because parents, media and environment have already shaped their thinking— thinking that often needs to be countered. And it often seems that no matter what you tell teenagers about the Holocaust today, they don’t really care about the Jews. It makes more sense to teach them about what happens when political systems fall apart and hatred is used as a political tool—whether it is Nazi Germany, Iran, or even the United States.

For what the survivors really want is that people of all ages need to be able to address their inability to care about the other guy, whether it’s a Jew in the Holocaust, an “Albanian” in Kosovo, a slave in Darfur, a little girl in Rwanda, or anyone of the 50,000,000 million victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing since the beginning of the twentieth century.

People need to learn about taking responsibility and speaking truth to power. Incredible as it may seem, there are some tools out there that are more effective than “establishment” Holocaust education materials. Much of that material is boring, and some of it even borders on what many educators today call Holocaust pornography, especially when showing photos of atrocities and tortured and naked victims. It some weird way, teachers say, the boys find it difficult to handle.

The answer is to find materials that kids can relate to, that speak to them in a medium they find familiar. In America, that means TV shows, and often popular programs can work.

Among them are classic episodes from the science fiction series like The Twilight Zone (“Death’s Head Revisited,” 1961) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths-Head_Revisited ) and “Star Trek” which deal with issues of bigotry, activism, totalitarianism, baseless hatred and revenge.

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” starring Frank Gorshin and Lou Antonio

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_Battlefield ) was first shown in 1969. It is perhaps the best of the entire lot for teaching the pointlessness of killing someone who isn’t exactly like you. “City on the Edge of Forever” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever ) raises moral issues about pacifism in the face of Nazism, and “Patterns of Force” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Force_(TOS_episode) ) deals with the dangers of totalitarianism and racism copied from the Nazis.

You can even start on some issues, like caring about other people, much earlier in the schoolroom, with movies like Dumbo the Elephant by Disney, or by following the Character Counts program established by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in San Mateo, California. You start by teaching young children to care about the child sitting next to them in the classroom, and by stressing the old-fashioned principles of what it means to be a good citizen—items that have been cut from the curriculum because they cost too much, because they are “values” education. (http://www.charactercounts.org )

One good book for middleschoolers available from Teacher’s Discovery. (http://www.teachersdiscovery.com/ ) The book, written by a Holocaust survivor who was a child slave in the Lodz Ghetto and an Auschwitz survivor, is about a dog named Lala. It is a true story about his pet puppy in Poland, and symbolizes the importance of love and loyalty. Created especially for the classroom, was written by Roman Kent that comes in 30-packs and cost $2.00 per copy—to make it affordable. It is also useful in higher grades because it can be used to raise many moral and ethical issues—based on the life of a lovely pet, not a Jew. The message is universal.

For the daring mavericks among the group, there is pop culture, Comedy Central style. Some of the episodes of South Park, the R-rated foul-mouthed series on cable, speak directly to the point: There was “The Passion of the Jew” that addressed the antisemitic issues raised by Mel Gibson’s film, and the devastating Halloween episode, “Pinkeye” with Cartman dressed as a Nazi. He is pulled into the principal’s office to be disciplined by lessons we now know don’t work: He is assigned to watch a film about Hitler, while the principal wags her finger in his face, saying the equivalent of “Bad, bad, bad.”

Music is also a powerful tool, and WuTang Clan, on its “Killa Bees” CD, produced in 2000, has Remedy doing a number called “Never Again.” The lyrics are available on line at (http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/wutangclan/neveragain.html ). The song begins with a classic Hungarian Shabbat Kiddush, and ends with a recital of the first line of the “Hear O Israel” prayer and a gun shot. It is a very powerful educational tool for the segment of the population that is deeply into the hip-hop culture—mainly young, volatile men.

Miri Ben Ari, a Grammy-award winning musician, a grandchild of survivors, and an Israeli, has gone out of her way to create music that speaks to all people about the dangers of baseless hatred and the lessons of the Holocaust. Using hip-hop, modern dance and a traditional prayer, Adon Olam, which Jews recite daily, she has put together a powerful video that speaks to young

7 people, and was recently performed at Yad Vashem (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXLOlQK2r-I).

It is hoped that constant innovation and revamping and distribution of resources for secular schools will get the real message of the Holocaust across to those who are not Jewish, and will take into account their own histories and personal experiences. Teachers can make use of the links on the website of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants to find additional resources from many places around the world. But they should be discriminating in their choices and seek universal messages that resonate with young people.

Serious teachers and schools should also take advantage of the teacher training programs offered by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with other organizations, because no one should be teaching this complicated subject without proper guidance. Thousands of teachers have gone through these programs and have done excellent work with their students. In fact, as a result of the lawsuit mentioned above concerning New Milford High School, one of the top Holocaust teachers in the New Jersey system was assigned to the school and took a group of students to Poland and Israel.

On the other hand, Holocaust Education also means dealing with issues in the Jewish community, where everything becomes theologically problematical, and enthusiastic attempts to reach children sometimes go overboard. In one case, a Jewish community center had a program where children from the ages of 6-and up assisted in building a model of the Warsaw Ghetto out of Lego blocks.

This is the kind of misguided attempt that can often cause more damage than good. There is not a child in the Jewish world who needs to know anything about the Holocaust before he or she is 11 years old, and even then, it should be very limited. By sending a message about the ghetto, about Jews being locked up, about people coming to kill you when you are a little child, little kids become very frightened. And the safe, secure God that protects them from evil becomes something else entirely. A boogey man, a punisher. Something to be afraid of. And it marks the child in the child’s mind, as a potential victim.

What really matters is that the lessons of the Holocaust for Jewish students cover a gamut of objectives—from Jewish continuity, to political awareness and empowerment, and not least of all the role of a Jewish God in all of this.

Certain basic tenets of the religion as it practiced today must be addressed. There is a popular distortion among large groups of observant Jews, who are otherwise rational beings, that the Holocaust was a punishment on the Jews from God for any number of sins: for the Enlightenment, for Zionism, for becoming Communists…It is taught in some places as being Midat Hadin, a measure of justice that blames other Jews for what happened to the Jewish people. That teaching infuriates survivors and is contrary to the Torah. (Who dares proclaim they know what was in God’s mind? One survivor, furious when he heard this, asked if his parents deserved to die and if he, as an innocent child, deserved to go to Auschwitz.)

The other problem is that the Holocaust has become a central tenet of American Jewish life because it replaces non-ritual with a new one. (So-called “marginal” Jews who attend synagogue on Rosh Hashanna and Yom Kippur, and attend at least one Passover seder, have added Yom haShoah to their liturgical duties. Attend a commemoration, and you have fulfilled a religious obligation.) But many of them have a problem dealing with a punishing and vicious God who kills 1.5 innocent babies.

By blaming the victims and exonerating the perpetrators by making them God’s partner in this punishment of the Jews, students, who are not stupid, would ask why anyone would believe in such a vicious and cruel God. Why should they be Jewish? Would God make Hitler His partner in anything? Such a lesson is damaging, especially when it teaches one group of Jews to despise and disrespect Jews who aren’t exactly like them.

Kids should be Jewish because Judaism has values of its own; the Holocaust is not the focal point of the religion. Jewish children should be Jewish because Judaism teaches morality and ethics, because it has intrinsic worth. They should not be Jewish to spite Hitler and his perennial antisemitic cohorts.

When we teach Jewish children Judaism, it should be about the joys and ethics, not about the do nots, the be nots and the will nots, with the idea that God is an old man in a long white beard who micromanages the universe and totes up points on a scoreboard. We must teach our children that Judaism teaches them to be responsible for their own actions, and that they must act for the good of all mankind as well as for themselves. It means teaching them that the true practice of Judaism is to treat the other person as a person, and not as a means to an end. It means you don’t have to send every Jewish child to Auschwitz to make him or her a better Jew.

Because sending kids to visit Auschwitz will, in the end, NOT turn them into better Jews, or Zionists, or militants—people motivated enough to no longer be sheep ripe for slaughter. It kicks in the revenge motif, and kids become arrogant and intolerant—and they create enough incidents in Poland, too many. Even the President of Poland complained.

This is not the Holocaust education that the survivors seek. What they want is “Jewish continuity.” Survivors want to communicate a rich heritage of culture and accomplishment that was the hallmark of their experience, not a heritage of murder and atrocity that must be redeemed with arrogance and protestations of victimhood.

The way to do that is to teach students the positive values of Judaism. The ethics of the prophets and the basis of the Torah. To teach them the beauties of the holidays, to teach them about freedom and what it really means.

Yes, we need to remember the Six Million. Six Million, a number students have tried to quantify with paper clips ( http://www.paperclipsmovie.com/synopsis.php ) and pennies, a number beyond imagining.

We should canonize a Jewish service for those millions. That is an internal issue, an issue for Jewish people who can push the rabbis to create a liturgy and ceremony to incorporate into our set prayers and rituals. Older students can design their own ceremonies and liturgies, which would be an interesting way to remember.

Who were these Six Million? They were our aunts and uncles, our grandparents, and yes, even sisters and brothers. They were rabbis, housewives, doctors, nurses, shoemakers, silversmiths, watercarriers, woodchoppers, tanners, farmers. They came from every walk of life, every economic class, every political belief and every Jewish denomination.

How shall we remember each soul?

David Gold, a Modern Orthodox fellow, was sitting shiva for his mother, a Holocaust survivor, and put forth an idea. The eulogy he’d given spoke of his mother, and then he added the others. He spoke the names she taught him to remember, the names of those he never met—his grandparents, his aunts, his uncles, his cousins. To those in the chapel, he recalled what had happened to them under the hands of the murderous Germans and their allies.

He said, “Maybe we should remind everyone, second generation and even others, that when they have to give eulogies for their parents and family members, to remember those who didn’t have a funeral, and give them a place to have Kaddish said for them. After all, our parents promised to remember them, and we said we would do the same. Wouldn’t it be something if everyone did it? We could actually say Kaddish for some of the kedoshim (the martyrs) and remember them by name.”

That seems to be a reasonable way to incorporate the recent past into the liturgy of the Jewish people. Then there is the need to incorporate lessons into the thoughts of our Jewish communal leadership, many of whom are afraid to assert themselves in a world that grows ever more divided and seems to seethe with hatreds.

“Remember what Simon Wiesenthal did with his life,” Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said after the Nazi hunter died. “Simon fought for remembering the Holocaust, since forgetting seemed to be a serious danger until the 1970s. It was not then fully understood and might have been forgotten. But today, we aren’t fighting for memory; no one will forget. Today we are fighting the dangers of denial and distortion. Lessons have to be learned.

“One lesson is: Don’t ignore your enemies; take them seriously when they make threats. Another is that you have an obligation to speak out when other people face similar tragedies, even when those tragedies are not the Holocaust. And there is the importance of holding perpetrators accountable.”

Therefore, despite all the historical and religious revisionism, it still boils down to this: Men and women perpetrated the Holocaust—no one was actually wearing horns and a tail or spitting

10 fire…they were human beings suffering from the denial and/or the absence of God in their lives who destroyed good people. Evil was ascendant over good. And so, fighting evil is humankind’s job—when you see it, act against it. Period. And that is the lesson of the Holocaust that needs to be taught. That is what we must remember, by telling the story to our students, one life at a time.

Jeanette Friedman, a freelance writer in New Jersey, and David Gold are collaborating on a book about Holocaust remembrance that will be published next fall.