Posted on 07/26/2017 7:57:40 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Incredibly, it wasn’t until I was 19 that I learned that there had been a Holocaust. My hyper-assimilated, New England Jewish family and friends looked only to the present and future. We focused on the polio vaccine that promised to banish the iron lungs that had been our childhood terror. We trusted in the United Nations, whose gleaming buildings my father took me to see when they were brand-new, and from which I came away with hopeful admiration—mixed, however, with a vague sense, which I couldn’t have put into words then, that perhaps an enterprise housed in architecture so grandiosely superhuman, so showy but flimsy, and so modernistically disdainful of the past, might be too utopian to ensure the world peace it envisioned. I know that I read The Diary of Anne Frank back then, but I was probably too young to identify with a girl, so it made no impression. But as a college freshman, I went to see a movie that had as its unannounced co-feature Alain Resnais’s spare, half-hour documentary Night and Fog, made up of photographs and film clips of the Nazi death camps. Utterly unprepared and unsuspecting, I came abruptly face-to-face with what had actually happened in the very recent past—indeed, was still happening even in the first months of my own life. I came out of the Thalia theater weeping like a baby, forever changed. True, as I learned later, the movie never uttered the word Jew, and the films that General Eisenhower ordered to be made of the liberated camps, so that people would believe the otherwise incredible, were still more gruesome. No matter. I was never the same.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
When you have no God but yourself, your definitions of good and evil are whatever you want them to be.
Myself, I am nothing short of amazed @ how knowledgeable I have become the last 50-60 years or so...b4 that...never mind!
;)
Dick G
*****
So what he's really saying is that he didn't pay attention in school. I am fairly certain it was taught in his school, especially if he read The Diary of Anne Frank.
Sometimes it happens by accident. My daughter read the paperback book of Anne Frank; I think it’s titled “Who was Anne Frank”. After reading that she began asking me questions about WWII and Nazis, etc. My answers were somewhat filtered of course so she could comprehend.
Thanks go posting this profound and important essay.
Not only do they not grasp the Holocaust, they really don’t comprehend Jim Crow. Because everything is sensationalized in their world, they naturally think it is all hyperbole.
Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Reminds me of standing in my aunt’s kitchen when I was little, screwing my eyes tightly shut and proclaiming, “You can’t see me!”
Too young to remember the Cambodian genocide by the environmentalist/communist Khmer Rouge?
Too young to remember the Rwandan / Burundi genocides, or the Yazidi genocide?
No.
The people who talk not of these things or outright attempt to discount them do do because it is their aspiration to repeat them.
Wow. Seeing “Night and Fog” referenced in the article brought back strong (and sickening) memories because I watched it in (public) school sometime during the mid-70’s.
Ashland Junior High School, Walker Street in Ashland, Oregon.
Night and Fog was part of the curriculum as well as similar WWII films. The horrific scenes are still etched in my mind. We had to write about it.
No way in hell they’d let students watch it now, but they should.
“nuff said.
Never, ever forget.
Herman Wouk did more for teaching history than any teacher in school.
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