Six Million Thoughts

I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment that has had me thinking quite a bit about the Holocaust. (A bit of light reading, as they say...) It's actually a fascinating story about one man's quest to know what happened to his Jewish great uncle's family during World War II. I haven't finished it yet, so I don't know what happens, but that which I have read raises an interesting question...

I've wondered about this now and again in the last decade or so, as I came of age and learned more about that period in history. What was in the minds of the Jewish population in America while 6 million were slaughtered half a world away?

Daniel Mendelsohn, the wordy but poignant author of this book, entitled Lost: the Search for Six of Six Million, explores the myriad of possible answers to this question that range from the obvious—news didn't travel so far and so fast back in those days—to the painful thought that a dispute between family members estranged them overseas, or to the less obvious and more gut-wrenching reality that perhaps American Jews could do nothing to save their European brethren, and they had to sit safe but helpless an ocean away in agony.

It makes me regret with a blameless sadness that my Jewish relatives who lived in that era died before I could ask them that question. How can we learn from history if we don't know?

I came across this piece in the Times today, about the war crime trial of an 89-year-old former Nazi accused of being a "living cog in a killing factory" at a death camp in Poland during World War II. A Holocaust survivor is interviewed in the piece and makes a good point that it's not so important that the old man be punished, but that the world hears his testimony. Not that we need to avenge what happened, but that we be able to recognize that it happened.

Maybe prove to a younger, more distant generation that the human race is capable of some ugly things...