Why we keep talking about the Holocaust

By Rabbi Ben Kamin

SAN DIEGO — “It was a hundred years ago,” said the gentleman encountered at a conference. “Why do you people still keep talking about it?”

I corrected him and responded that it was not a hundred years ago; that the Wannsee Conference of top Nazi officers—a number of whom held doctorates—was held seventy years ago in the pleasant Berlin suburb during which the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, already well-underway, was formally certified around a buffet luncheon table. All of Europe’s 11 million Jews were designated for extermination before coffee was served. Six million Jews were vaporized, along with another six million gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, Catholic priests who cared, black folks, and other undesirables.

And I told him that it was not a hundred years ago; it was a thousand years ago, and it was now, and it was seventy years from now. And that it was about the four-hundred year chaining and annihilation of African slaves in America; about the genocide of Armenians in the early 20th century; about the systemic elimination of the Apaches from Wyoming, the Shawnee from Ohio, and the Seminoles from Florida; it was about Rwanda not long ago; and about the massacre of Syrian children by their own government today.

But then I told him that for me it was specific and urgent and always and that my grandchildren who might be born and hopefully still be alive seventy years from now would be the answer to his question just by breathing.

I gently grabbed his hand and told him about Rabbi Leo Baeck, who secretly taught about Greek philosophy and performed makeshift Passover Seders in the concentration camp—there, in discreet candlelight in a place that even God seemed to have forsaken.

I mentioned the Jewish children of France who were mechanically separated from their parents and siblings, packed into dark cattle cars by French police, and shipped to the gas chambers of Auschwitz from the Le Bourget station in Paris. I mentioned Berlin’s Anhalt railroad station, site of so many deportations, now a memorial, which is still being vandalized and desecrated today.

I reflected about the grandmothers of Romania, torn away from their sweet-smelling kitchens and group-raped; the aunts and uncles of Lithuania who were burned alive in their own synagogues; the parents and children of Kiev, Russia, who were marched into the forests of Babi Yar and shot together in ditches they themselves were forced to dig.

And then I told him that we Jews are still here because we have always met brutality with the power of ideas.

And that the idea of him asking why we still talk about it was exactly why we do.

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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com