Response to the Holocaust

The powerpoint that we watched today about the Nazi Death Camps was probably one of the most traumatizing lessons I've ever had to endure, I left class appalled by the bestiality of human beings and their ability to distance themselves so far from reality that they were unable to perceive the Jews as fellow human beings. I was moved by the photos of the concentration camps, although I had seen them all (or photos like them) many times before. It is interesting to me that even as we expressed disbelief that people could deny that such an atrocity had ever occurred, we were able to speak candidly about pulling fillings from the mouths of the dead and shoveling bodies into ovens. It doesn't seem a stretch to imagine Nazi soldiers desensitized to the horror of their crimes or entire religious movements proclaiming the holocaust a hoax when a photos that should move us are reduced to merely articles of evidence that it actually occurred.

There is a common German saying Einmal ist keal inm which translates roughly "what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all." Since the Holocaust only happened once (or so we would like to think) it fades into the past. Eventually events fade into the past, losing the emotion and meaning that they once had and depleting into a tangle of philosophical ideas about the human condition. I have no cure for this situation, yet it concerns me. I wonder if this is why history is destined to repeat itself.