Never again: Remembering is our responsibility

I never thought I'd be here again, but the river has many twists and turns, and it's surprising at times where life will bring us back.

In 2003 I was the managing editor of the Cranford Eagle. One day my reporter, Josh Salt, came back from an outing he'd been on with a group of Cranford High School students. As part of their education on the Holocaust, the students had all been to see "The Pianist," a movie set during World War II and focused on a Jewish concert pianist's efforts to avoid capture and stay alive during this time.

The movie affected its teen audience, and Josh had found it well done.

"You should see it," he said.

"No thanks," I said. "I'm good."

We'd worked side by side for months, kabbitzed about life outside the newsroom, and generally got along well. My reaction caught him off-guard.

"Why not?" he asked, so I explained.

I had read "Night" in the dawning months of 1989, in one of my religion classes at college, and I had been so shaken to the core by Elie Wiesel's account of the Shoah that I think I cried for three days. At one point, he writes of his arrival at Auschwitz, "I will never forget that first night in the camp." I wasn't there, but I will never forget either.

That same class we saw "Night and Holocaust," a black-and-white documentary of Nazi atrocities, filmed around the Nuremberg hearings. There were piles of hair shaved from the heads of Jewish prisoners, snippets of film where Jews at the camps were shot for entertainment, and more horror presented matter-of-factly. I was so upset by that one I couldn't eat.

"We keep saying 'Never forget,'" I told him. "I won't."

Josh nodded thoughtfully and accepted my explanation.

"Fair enough," he said.

Yet here we are, and here I am. In the past four years we've seen a groundswell of racism and anti-Semitism in the country and around the world. Four years ago, Donald Trump linked Hillary Clinton to the imaginary cabal of Jews running the world economy; more recently he's repeated the tired calumny that America can't count on her Jewish citizens because their first loyalty is to Israel. Our country has seen armed gunmen shooting worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and we've witnessed a parade of white supremacists marching through an American city and chanting "Jews will not replace us!" I've heard people at my church who should know better talk about George Soros and the riots and caravans of illegal immigrants he finances to destabilize America.

And let's not forget Candace Owens, who in 2019 said Hitler would have been just fine if he'd focused on making Germany great, as though foreign policy were his only flaw.

So I find myself returning to Holocaust literature deliberately for the first time in decades. Earlier this month I finished reading Wiesel's existentialist novel, "The Town Beyond the Wall," set against the backdrop of the Shoah. Now I'm opening Malka Adler's "The Brothers of Auschwitz." More of these books and these stories, I am sure, lie in my reading list in the coming weeks and months.

Hitler and his fellows, it should be remembered, systematically killed six million Jews during the period of World War II, in an act we remember as the Shoah, or the Holocaust. This was not a crime against humanity; as Wiesel once argued, it was aimed at Jews specifically because they were Jews, and in the eyes of the Nazis and much of the rest of the world that made them less than human. There were others who died at the camps, but none was targeted for extermination as methodically nor as purposefully as the Jews were.

Never again. We dare not let ourselves forget.