Never again?

The admonition to ‘never forget’ doesn’t work for me - I have no problem remembering.   

As a child of survivors, I want people to know that what I remember, what the admonition wants you to remember and what I think we should remember are three very different things. 

I grew up with the war humming in the background of our family life.  My father and my mother, her two sisters and their husbands were all concentration and labor camp survivors, each with their distinct but similar histories of where they were and what happened to them during the war.  When our parents got together, sometimes when we kids were in the room, unexpectedly the conversation would take a turn and we’d hear a story of life during the war, a mention of some person or place no longer with us, maybe a description of how sick my aunt had been with typhus, or how a friend working in the ‘kitchen’ took the risk of sharing a backhanded scoop of sugar with my father passing by, keeping him alive another day.  

I knew there were other relatives and family members who weren’t with us, but it was complicated to remember them all - at a young age I didn’t know even how many there were or their names and or how they were related to me.  What I did knew was that it was just the 6 of them and us 5 kids who were born here in the U.S.  They’d somehow survived until liberation freed them and they immigrated here for a fresh chance.  My dad said once, “It wasn’t the holocaust, it was my life.”  These stories, told in accented English, sprinkled with Yiddish and Polish words, shadowed and contrasted with my own life very American upbringing.  I did not get a legacy from my parents so much as a chronicle of the disintegration of any that I might have inherited.  If I thought of myself at all, in my mind’s eye I saw myself standing with my back towards a deep void, heels teetering at the edge, toes pointing forward, with no expectation of looking back, there was nothing there.

I remember vividly the day that it dawned on me that not everyone’s parents had survived the war.  I was a child attending a birthday party, maybe in kindergarten or first grade, I think my friend’s name was Roxanne.  I walked into the house and there was her mom and her grandmother, helping to herd us kids through the party.  Together the two of them led us through games and sang along when it was time to have the birthday cake, working together to cut slices and scoop ice cream for each of us kids.  Her grandmother had white hair and a pink wrinkled face and spoke perfect English.  Roxanne’s mother had a mother!  I was stunned.  It was obvious that she’d never been out of the U.S. and surely had never been dirty or sick, starving, or terrified.  She was born here!  I suddenly connected with what I saw and realised that there were families that could reach back in time confidently, they didn’t teeter precariously on the edge, but were happily sharing the passage of life from one generation to the next.  

So, no, I ‘never forget’ as I don’t have any trouble remembering.

But what does that admonition to ‘never forget’ want you and the rest of the world to do with that remembrance?  I think we collectively assume that it’s referring to the devastation of the war, the cruelty and systematic genocide.  The hope is that if we ‘never forget’ these awful things, we will be less likely to repeat them.  No one wants that again.  Fine, but I think it misses the mark. What we should never forget is not the war itself, but the conditions that led to it happening in the first place. By the time there is the momentum and advantage towards genocide or a holocaust it’s too late.  The admonition should apply to what we can change now - nationalism, fascism, racism, the attitudes that grow and excuse evil and that need to flourish before the turn towards cruelty, horror and results like what we saw in the holocaust.  It’s not that we should ‘never forget’ but rather that we should ‘always remember’ to take care of our vulnerable populations, learn to recognize an ‘us and them’ mentality, address poverty, understand wealth inequality, educate people to be critical thinkers.  The neglect of these things is what should never happen again.