Thoughts on International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Earlier today, I saw a post by Regina Spektor of a film recommendation on Instagram as a tribute to the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I didn’t know the importance of January 27th until I looked it up and found that the Auschwitz Death Camp was liberated 74 years ago today. Just as I reflexively hit “repost” as an act to spread awareness, I froze to wonder, shouldn’t I have more to say than just a “repost?”
An act as simple as the mindless tap of “repost” worried me. With the accessibility to information at my fingertips, I slowly neglect the process of rumination, becoming an information coma poisoned by passivity. Without intentionally reminding myself when I read and listen, reflecting on my past is no longer an instinctive habit. I’ve always been aware of the important role that active reflection plays in the journey to maturity. Every step we’ve taken in history boils down to a collective decision propelled by ideologies shared by different hives of people, in which we become essential parts. The tragedy caused by the Holocaust wasn’t committed by a few, the Constitution wasn’t a result of one social group. Ideas and preconceptions, both good and bad, clash, overturn, and reform like relish in a cooking pot. Thus, ruminating on the cause and effect of social issues and being informed citizens ourselves is a shared responsibility crucial to the ongoing history we author as a whole.
I closed my eyes for a second. Thoughts and feelings that have subsided years ago tiptoed into my mind.
In 2016, I took two elective classes about the Holocaust and genocide. Learning about the periods of inhumanity used to give me immense emotional agony. I remember crying for one hour straight during the film Bent, which I watched alone at one A.M.; nausea that hit me like mortality after viewing images of the mountains of hair that belonged to the camp prisoners; and every lecture sucked a little life out of me. I could not imagine the devastation suffered by the victims. Those days, dejection enshrouded my heart like an invisible dome every time these topics were discussed. They became the barbed-wire gates, a taboo that I avoided conjuring not because of apathy, but because of my incompetence. I never finished the last few chapters of Survival in Auschwitz.
Later that semester, an epiphany struck my heart in a class project I did on the Rwandan Genocide.
Prior to taking the class, I had never heard of the Rwandan Genocide and most of the Genocides listed on our course agenda. Although my family values educating kids on social issues and world history, Genocides were never part of the dinner discussion, let alone the Genocide Remembrance Day. I was appalled to find out the last Genocide — the Darfur Genocide, which caused the death of 300,000 people and the replacement of 2 million people — took place in 2003, only less than two decades away now. The idea of Genocide has never seemed so close and so threatening. After comparing and contrasting the stages of different Genocides, I couldn’t stop wondering: if the Eight Stages of Genocide have become a repeating pattern, then how come we kept following the same path? Step one, classification; step two, symbolization; step three: dehumanization… Does the social tension going on today between political parties, cultural enclaves, countries, and so on put us in the middle of the pre-stages of another Genocide?
Since the revelation, I made up my mind to never be silent about the Genocides and to speak up for Genocide Awareness. It is indeed something we must never stop thinking about as humankind. Genocides are failures of humanity, a cascade of hatred we fail to recognize and resolve before our hands are covered in blood. If more people were able to claim our collective responsibility and think for others, the countless innocent would still be living a loving life with their families and contributing their talent and effort to this world we share together.
Yet I didn’t know that no matter how resolved I was about advocating for Genocide Awareness, it is never the same as facing it in real life.
Two years ago, I visited my great-grandma with my family at a nursing home in Willoughby, Ohio. When I walked my grandma back to her room after dinner, we passed by an old lady who was standing outside watering flowers. My grandma greeted her. The lady paused, smiled at us, and commented on how beautiful the day was. “She survived the Holocaust,” my grandma said to me after we were inside the building. I looked back in haste, a surge of emotion urged me to go back and initiate a conversation with her, perhaps tell her how admirable she is after everything she’s been through and how much I care about the past. Instead, I just stood and stared through the glass door. After all, what do I know? What’s my place to empathize with her or to grieve for her past? I watched as she walked around the garden, holding down her silver watering pot. Flowers and leaves wiggle their heads in the drizzle of life. She looked ethereal in her creamy-white dress, her silver hair with strands of ashy blonde elegantly tucked into a bun. The sunset illuminated a warm glow, and the wound was peacefully concealed.
Today, the thought of her haunts me still. If we were to meet again, I still could not utter a word. Behind the silence, so many words and feelings — so many — remain unspoken. History is irrevocable, and there is nothing more pale and useless than apologies after a crime has been done. Words are just ink-stranded on paper. Luckily, we can still prevent the next apocalypse of humanity from happening, and those unspoken words can find their voice in the future. Our future.
— written on January 27th
