Eleh Ezkerah

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day - very nearly exactly the 66th anniversary of the final liberation of Germany's concentration camps (the last "big one," Bergen-Belsen, was liberated on April 15, 1945). It's an appropriate moment to remember that there are two components to the "Never Forget" motto so inextricably associated with the Holocaust. The first is to defend the victims themselves: to fight to remember each extinguished soul as an identity, rather than a statistic. There are, of course, any number of ways to connect. Projects like Francesco Lotoro's miraculous KZ Musik series demonstrate how music allowed the spirits of imprisoned composers to escape the darkness of the camps. Documentaries like Alain Resnais' Night and Fog make the overwhelming inhumanity of the Holocaust less abstract, while dramatizations like Steven Spielberg's immortal Schindler's List can highlight the essence of basic human decency even in the face of the unspeakable. (I humbly encourage you to check out a Holocaust memorial journal issue I worked on last year, available here; free hard copies are available by mail on request.)

The second critical component of "Never Forget" concerns the perpetrators, rather than the victims. Appropriately, this evening President Obama announced the death of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden - a man, much like Adolf Hitler, driven by a virulently hateful ideology, willing and even eager to extinguish the lives of however many innocents stood in the way of the realization of his plans for the world. History tells us with unflinching regularity that mankind is wont to produce men of unrepentant evil. Just as we are bound to protect their would-be victims and remember the fallen, so too are we required to do all in our power to wrest from them the capacity to harm, from rapists to the perpetrators of genocide in Sudan. For so long as evil persists, none of us are truly free.

לזכר ששת המליון

May their memories never be forgotten.