Remembering the Holocaust

I remember seeing my grandmother's prison dress from Auschwitz for the first time when I was very young. It was nothing much to speak of, a simple striped pattern on poor person's cloth. Yet somehow this garment had complexity woven into it as well, a product of the loom of nationalism, bigotry and inhumanity that gave rise to that most unfathomable of evils--the Nazi Holocaust.

Half a century later, my mother returned to Auschwitz. As part of the American delegation attending the ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the camp's liberation, she returned not in a cattle car, but in business class. The ceremonies were historical, to be sure, but they had a broader goal. The nations of the world came together and asserted that the evil of Auschwitz did not belong on this planet. Hungary, Poland, Russia, England, France and others testified that humanity cannot allow such injustices to happen again.

This week, as we commemorate Yom Ha-Shoah or the Day of Remembrance, the question naturally arises: what precisely was this evil called the Holocaust? How do we quantify it? Six million were murdered, but the numbers are not central. Twenty million Russians died in the same war.

What is at the heart of this cruelty? The desire to wipe out a people. A calculated strategy to exterminate human beings because of their religious beliefs and supposed racial inferiority. And the world's silence in the face of this strategy. But how does the Holocaust fit into history? Is it a unique event like none that came before it and like none that will come after? Or is it an appalling tragedy whose lessons are not meant merely to be pontificated on but applied? In short, can it be used as an historical analogue?

Many would maintain that it cannot. Historical isolationists claim that the enormity of the evil that occurred in mid-century Europe was beyond anything seen before on earth. The Nazis committed singular crimes, they argue, fundamentally incongruous with any other historical acts of violence or even genocide.

Many would agree, but the isolationists take the argument one step further. They then conclude that the Holocaust has no real applied lessons. Since no other situations in history are compatible with the Holocaust model, we cannot look to it for practical advice on confronting evil in the world today.

Furthermore, they argue, we must be wary of crying wolf with "Never Again." Steven Katz, former director of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, travels around the country emphasizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Though ethnic cleansing in Bosnia may be a tragedy, he says, a Holocaust it isn't. Making such comparisons only cheapens the value of the Jewish tragedy.

He has a point. After all, the systematic destruction of a people, guided by a "final solution" which was to be implemented even after military defeat was assured, is quite different from the recent, more haphazard atrocities in the former Yugoslavia.

And yet, Katz's argument rings hollow. Who is to say that a more organized, better funded and technologically more advanced Serb army wouldn't systematically destroy the Muslim population of Bosnia? Recently discovered documents have shown the evil intent of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic as he ordered the vicious murder of peaceful Bosnian Muslims. Are the Serbs just Nazis whose military teeth are not quite has sharp?

The isolationists are prepared to relegate the Holocaust to the category of historical curiosity and condemn all use of analogy as misguided and dangerous to the power of the Holocaust itself. Yet they themselves sap the Holocaust of meaning by making it inapplicable to modern problems. The vivid images of evil and the world's deafening silence that this tragedy conjures up are rendered irrelevant when it singularity is emphasized above all else.

Trivial comparisons are possible, and we must watch out for them. The problems of abortion and urban poverty are not the tragedy of the Holocaust. But ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and tribal murder in Rwanda are comparable. At their essence is a desire to eradicate people because of their ancestry and their beliefs.

Mark Twain is reputed to have said that history does not repeat itself; it rhymes. There will never be another Holocaust. The exact permutations of history that created it are lost forever, and in this respect every event is a historical singularity. But cracks in a world which we must strive to make perfect surround us. And not just cracks, but major breaches of ethics and humanity. The enduring power of the Holocaust is its ability to wake us from moral slumber and prod us into action.

Tomorrow, on Yom Ha-Shoah, the names of victims will be read all day on the steps of Widener Library. Their number is relatively small; none of us can even conceptualize six million names. If this were a Jewish tale, it would belong in synagogues, community centers and campus Hillels.

But it is not. It belongs on the steps of a famous library at a renowned university. This is a human story, not the tragedy of a people, but the failure of a world to hear the macabre rhymes of bigotry and genocide throughout history. These names should not merely give us pause; they should open our hearts and our eyes to suffering everywhere, so we can eradicate evil from the world.

As my mother flew to Poland in January, she looked up at the aisle. A major earthquake had just struck Japan, and the news showed clips of survivors amidst damaged buildings. Her first reaction was one of empathy. She identified with their homelessness, their cold, their devastation and she felt their pain. It was second nature for her as she headed into the pit of evil.

I doubt she would equate the two tragedies, but I also doubt she would see their inequality as no more than a historical curiosity. The cries of suffering united the two, and the memory of the Holocaust had helped her to hear them better. If the daughter of survivors, one who lost most of her family in this tragedy of tragedies could make that link, so should we all.

Ethan M. Tucker is chair of Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel.