Richard Cohen on Auschwitz
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes about Auschwitz:
Here is my fear. Because we cannot understand Auschwitz, because it is an immense bump in the road in our belief in a good God — “a just God,” the president said in his inaugural address — we will let it slip from memory, remembered maybe like some statue in the town square that memorializes something or other, maybe a war, maybe a man. Reminders will seem like nagging, and when the survivors are finally gone (they have been an incredibly hardy lot) so, too, will be the obligation to remember. Ah, what a relief!
Then, bit by bit, Auschwitz will fade, becoming something that happened in the last century to people who some may insist had it coming anyway — Jews and commies and Gypsies and homosexuals . . . mostly. For most people, it may become — it is already becoming — too dense a historic burden, a hideously heavy truth about who we can be, not just who we would like to be. Prince Harry just chucked it all. Someday, I fear, so shall we all and then — as it has in Rwanda and at Srebrenica — it will happen again.