2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. More than 5 million people died in those camps, many of them the relatives of students living in the United States today. To honor the victims of the Holocaust, in November the United Nations Organization declared today, the 27th of January — the date of the liberation of Auschwitz — an international day of commemoration.
A French magazine recently highlighted the annual trips French high schools organize to Poland so students can learn about the horrors of the Nazi regime.
World War II is one of the most painful episodes in modern collective French memory. After losing over one million young men in World War I, France lost thousands of the next generation in World War II. Visit any small village in France and see the names posted of those lost in battle. Some villages lost nearly all their young men.
Yet France also was home to members of the Nazi party. French citizens sent fellow citizens to meet their deaths in concentration camps. The spa center of Vichy was headquarters for the French collaborators. Visit Vichy today and you'll meet with a World War II acknowledged only in whispers.
The Australian Embassy in Paris sits on the site of a train station that sent Jews to death camps. Former President of France François Mitterrand, himself once connected with Vichy, eventually placed a memorial alongside the embassy.
It's understandable that France, like much of the world, still struggles to come to terms with the devastation of the Holocaust. So, perhaps, is it understandable that France seeks to educate students about a not-so-distant part of its history by organizing trips to Auschwitz.
But by declaring the 27th of January an international day of remembrance of Holocaust victims, the UNO is missing a much larger and more painful issue: namely, that the Holocaust was hardly the only instance of genocide in recent history, and that humans remain capable of repeating the violence seen between 1939 and 1945.
The sad reality is that people have always been extremely violent toward one another, whether because of religious or political or perceived racial differences. Catherine de Medici started the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, killing French Protestants by the thousands. When Europeans arrived in America and met with various Indian tribes, it's clear that genocide occurred; yet today the violence of these encounters is often downplayed. Africans died by the boatload on the Middle Passage on their way to an enslaved existence in the U.S.
Rather than focusing on one specific, albeit horrific, instance of human brutality, the UNO should create a day that raises awareness of the suffering of victims of genocide worldwide. This day of remembrance would certainly honor Holocaust victims, but also victims of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, the Indian victims of European settlers in America, victims of Stalin or Tutsi victims in the Rwandan genocide in the mid 1990's.
Most students in the U.S. and in Europe don't have to look hard to find a relative who was involved in World War II. All of my Jewish friends lost family members in concentration camps; my maternal grandfather was a tail-gunner for the Allied forces, flying over China, who still today finds aspects of the war traumatizing.
What is most shocking about the Holocaust is not the extreme suffering and loss it incurred, but that people remain as capable as ever of singling out other groups of people for genocide.
One girl quoted in the French press said that she could relate to the pain of Holocaust victims very well, as her family had suffered the same fate in Cambodia.
Let's make January 27th a day to remember all victims of genocide, to ensure that the Holocaust never happens again. Let's all say, "Never again. Anywhere."
Cynthia Martens ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in Italian and European Studies.
