Lessons from the Holocaust
As the world navigates another turbulent year, it marks the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust’s end. Commemorations commenced on January 27, with global leaders and survivors gathering in Oświęcim, Poland, to commemorate the occasion. This month marks the anniversaries of the liberation of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau, alongside Yom HaShoah on April 24. Memorial events will take place at over 175 Holocaust centers and museums in North America, as well as thousands of other memorials, schools, and communities worldwide.
While remembering is crucial, what are the enduring lessons of the Holocaust? This question is challenging to answer, given the frequent yet often superficial references to the Holocaust, juxtaposed with a perceived decline in detailed knowledge. Nevertheless, several significant lessons merit revisiting.
Firstly, atrocities like the Holocaust require specific enabling conditions. They frequently occur in states that are failing. The Weimar Republic’s failure to uphold liberal democratic values and respectful dialogue created a breeding ground for Nazism. The Nazi Party gained power democratically, ironically, on a platform that denigrated individual worth, promoted harmful stereotypes, romanticized a fabricated past, and used modern communication to spread propaganda and recruit followers. Once in power, the party shifted towards authoritarianism, subverting national institutions, the media, civil service, academia, and the legal system to align the state with its ideology and goals.
Certainly, numerous countries since 1945 have had ruling parties with similar traits, but without leading to genocide. The Holocaust required further elements: widespread apathy, elite complicity, and international community failure. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s warning against indifference was prescient: turning inward during conflict hinders courage and enables the exploitation of the vulnerable. In perpetrator nations, most were passive bystanders, but significant participation came from elites, including artists, academics, clergy, media figures, business leaders, and even doctors. Just as the elites faltered, so did the international order. Consider the Munich Agreement, which allowed Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia, the Evian Conference where the U.S. and other nations refused to accept more Jewish refugees, or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which paved the way for Germany and the Soviet Union to occupy and divide Poland in 1939. These failures emboldened fascism and its associated crimes.
Finally, and most importantly, the Holocaust was fueled by antisemitism, an ancient hatred pervasive across all societal levels. Millennia of animosity toward Jews had already resulted in countless deaths. Under authoritarianism, this hatred provided the Nazis with a framework to enlist willing participants and collaborators, and for large segments of the population to ignore or participate in violence against Jews.
We all have the potential to become perpetrators or passive accomplices to such crimes. Recognizing this possibility requires understanding that the Holocaust happened to real individuals with hopes, dreams, flaws, and inherent humanity. This realization is essential, which is why Holocaust museums worldwide connect visitors to the victims and survivors. By revealing the horrors of the past, they offer a lens through which to view the future, uniting Jews and non-Jews in confronting this history and its implications. Truly learning from the Holocaust demands engaging with the lived experiences of those who endured it.
This leads to a crucial final point: understanding this history makes one unable to tolerate the conditions that enabled the Holocaust, including antisemitism. Studying this topic transforms us, heightening awareness of hate’s signs and forms, and other threats to peace. To act on this knowledge, we must reject cynicism and indifference. Failure to do so, as Holocaust survivor and intellectual Primo Levi warned, risks granting the Nazis a posthumous victory. To prevent this, we must understand the past, recognize its relevance to our future, and remember the victims and survivors of the Holocaust in ways that create the world they deserved, not the one they were forced to experience.