Israel is observing Holocaust Remembrance Day today and stories and essays about The Holocaust have been trickling down my various news feeds.
What do my kids know about The Holocaust, I wondered. I don’t know exactly, but not very much. My eight-year-old probably has some sort of foggy idea, but my five-year-old almost certainly doesn’t. Have I ever talked to them about it? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.
If we were Jewish they would know. They would. And that’s ridiculous. You shouldn’t have to be a Jew to remember and talk about how not very long ago at all, the leader of one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world corralled Jewish people like cattle and led them into concentration camps where they suffered and, for the most part, ultimately died.
History’s catching up to me as I get older. When I learned about World War II in grade school, it might as well have been ancient history. Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, Christopher Columbus and the Second World War all seemed to have an equally distant connection to my actual life. This was in the 80s! The Cold War was still on. My grandfather had served in the navy. I had living connections to the war and it still felt so very far away. I mean, it was in history books.
But now I cannot get over how recent The Holocaust was. World War II ended in 1945. 1945. That’s only six years beforeĀ I Love Lucy! That’s only 15 years before the first season of Mad Men, in case you haven’t moved over to the Lucille Ball calendar yet. The HolocaustĀ JUST HAPPENED, guys. A few decades is nothing, a half a lifetime.
Of course, the Internet doesn’t even care about what happened last week. Our cumulative attention span is getting shorter and as technology continues to advance in leaps and bounds, everything always feels instantly dated. Dial up internet! An iPhone 3!
But the horrors of the past are not so far away as we might think. They reverberate everywhere in the dark recesses of fear, hatred, greed and power. They echo across the world as atrocity after atrocity continue to unfold. And we can’t fully understand the state of the world today without understanding what has gone before.
When we talk about the past, we breathe life into the history texts. We bring those stories to life for our kids and make them real. I have to remember to do more of that.
2 replies on “The Holocaust basically just happened. Our kids should know that.”
As the grandchild of two survivors, and the child of a mother born in a DP camp in Austria just after the war, I knew. I knew all of the stories. Everything. The bad, the good, everything. And it’s funny because I didn’t realize that other people DIDN’T know…it wasn’t until I moved out on my own and I met people who didn’t know enough, who didn’t know anything.
All of this is to say that YES, the world needs more parents like you, my friend.
Thank you, Ali.