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When I was a teacher, one of my favorite units was exploring the impact of world events like the Holocaust and the Russian Revolution on history. Every year, students would receive an identification card and trace that individual through the course of the atrocities that occurred in Auschwitz. Though it’s been nearly two years since I stopped teaching, I hold those lessons near and dear to my heart.
This past weekend, my husband and I had an opportunity to visit the Auschwitz exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum. From the moment we set foot into the crowded rooms, the weight of memories, silence, and testimonies filled the air. Every wall recorded mass extermination and Germany’s takeover. TV screens blared videos of survivors and victims alike. People around me shook their heads, blew their noses, and wiped away tears. Some, viewing the brutalities for the first time. Because one thing was evident inside the walls of this museum: this experience wasn’t just historical, it was deeply spiritual.
Why Remembering Matters
Especially for people of faith, remembering events like the Holocaust matters for a variety of reasons. First, there is an immense danger when we become removed from history. Not only do we quickly and easily forget, but we also lose empathy, insight, and overall awareness. In one of the survivor accounts, a thin man noted that people had already begun to say that the entire event never happened. It was propaganda or an event “imagined.” Despite hard facts and evidence, even the Nazi’s themselves tried to go along with this theory despite being the ones to cause harm. Shortly after the Allied forces liberated the concentration and extermination camps, the Nazi’s tried to burn evidence of the events that had occurred. But it was too late and nearly impossible.
While the conclusion of WWII in 1945 freed the remaining prisoners, it didn’t undo the damage that had already taken place. Survivors will tell you that the “never again” mantra isn’t just a happy slogan, but a moral responsibility. And the minute we forget these events really happened, the easier it will be for something like this to happen again.
In the poem First They Came, by Pastor Martin Niemöller, Niemöller explains what happens when groups of people divide themselves based on gender, race, or religion. If we only care about people like us, what will happen when no one like us remains? The short poem reads this way:
“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.”
When we forget, ignore, or become naive to events like these in history, we produce fertile ground for repetition. If we forget what has happened, not only are these events likely to happen again, but everything that victims before us have endured goes down in vain. It can also significantly distort our views of God and His people.