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"And here is a truth: In
our secret selves, we can grow old while we are still young; we can
cross borders that no one else can see. We can hear voices that have
long been silent.”
-Katherine Lasky, from
her novel,
Blood Secret
In kindergarten, I was
told that I was one in a million. At that early age of six I learned the
value of one million and sampled its magnitude in my young mind. The
number became untouchable, abstractly mythical. I wanted to be a million
feet tall, eat a million strawberry sundaes, score a million on my
spelling test.
Million. Even now I stop and whisper the word, rolling the sorrowful,
immortal juices of it over my tongue. I was fifteen when I really tasted
a million: curled into the folds of my couch as the images of a war that
wasn’t mine flitted across the screen, my super-number dropped its
pretense of mundane calculation. And in its place? Were faces. One
million faces peeked out at me from history, from death. And then the
unreachable was reached, was surpassed— Now four million innocents wept
or clung to their families for comfort. Now seven million pairs of
haunted eyes avoided the camera, or maybe worse, met the lense with
those vacant, horrified expressions that cried out for freedom, for
life.
Some were family shots from before World War II had even begun, and
those were the worst. Because millions of candid grins flashed, here
holding a child, here feeding a sleek horse, there asleep in a big man’s
beefy arms. My eyes stung and ran over. And I knew then that millions
don’t taste like strawberry sundaes, but the salt of tears.
In total, over eleven million innocent people perished in the Holocaust—
Jews, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Slavs, and others. Even fellow Aryan
‘supermen’ who fell short of the Führer’s standards were eliminated
(within seven months after October 1939, roughly 10,000 innocents were
slaughtered in West Prussia and the Warthegau simply because they were
deemed mentally unsound (Rees—pg 43)).
Everywhere chaos reigned as Jews in particular were singled out and
targeted for all sorts of ridiculous decrees, including a Nazi-regulated
curfew and exclusion from parks, cinemas, and swimming pools. Their
radios were confiscated, their art work and jewelry were banned, and
their businesses closed. Concentration camps, veritable factories of
death, were created to implement the Nazi concept of the ‘Final
Solution’— their mass murder. 1.1 million men, women, and children lost
their lives in Auschwitz alone from its time of operation in 1940 to its
liberation in 1945.
And yet, the Nazi regime, mechanized as it was, could not deny its own
sin of genocide. Reinhard Heydrich, deputy in command of Hitler’s SS
police force himself, claimed that “biological extermination is
undignified for the German people as a civilized nation” (Goetz). In the
meantime, Heydrich’s superior Heinrich Himmler justified his SS’s
vicious slaughter of innocent lives by claiming: “he would not like it
if Germans did such a thing gladly. But their conscience was in no way
impaired, for they were soldiers who had to carry out every order
unconditionally” (Hilberg). So then even the highest-ranking of Nazi
officers could not shelter their principles from the darkness of their
crime.
So now I will offer a truth: the elements of Social Darwinism which lace
the Nazi Regime and Hitler’s own book Mein Kampf are a farce. Charles
Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection in which “progress,” comes “from
‘the struggle for survival,’ as the. . . strong. . .” advance while the
weak decline cannot exist when applied to society as justified politics
(Spielvogel— pg. 714). The oppression of another person or group is not
a process of nature— it’s a crime.
It’s a crime ever so cautiously repeating itself in countries across the
globe from Darfur and Ethiopia, with the genocide of their minority
peoples; and yes, even to the shores of America, my beautiful,
magnificent homeland, where boys boldly prowl the school halls with
swastikas inked on their backpack flaps for all the world to see and all
the authorities to disregard. It’s a crime that stole away the lives of
millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children. It’s a crime
that went virtually unpunished sixty-odd years ago: of the 6,500 SS men
at Auschwitz (by far the most infamous of the Nazi death camps),between
1940 and 1945 who are believed to have survived the war, only 750 were
ever penalized (Lasik).
And furthermore, it’s a crime that might be stopped. Darwinism was
created by one man, its subsequent genocide, exercised by hundreds of
thousands. The Nazi party was devised by one man, perpetuated by an
endless stream of machine-like soldiers. So then, by basic nature the
vicious, fiery cycle of prejudice and sub-humanization could be halted
too— by the effort of one person.
The classic American author John Steinbeck said in his novel East of
Eden, that “men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens
there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong, sure man, even
though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.” History
throughout the ages has been set into motion by the actions of
individuals. “One person— a Raul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a
Martin Luther King Jr.— one person of integrity can make a difference”
(Wiesel— Acceptance Speech ). It is this proven concept which compels us
to ever maintain our singularity in society, to nurture that which sets
us apart from the rest of the world and to utilize it. As students, we
must always cherish our separateness, and forever use it to do good in
our world. We must use the tools we’ve been given to pave the way for
understanding and build bridges of camaraderie, that one day we may
stand together and tear down all forms of racism— from anti-Semitism to
anti-Americanism to anti-Hinduism— and know that the cycle has ended.
Maybe then there will be some solace for those souls torn away in the
fury of the Holocaust.
We cannot look away while the evils of genocide are still at work within
our world, for “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim”
(Wiesel— Speech). And at the same time, we must never stray from our
past, from the millions who lost their lives to the demons in the hearts
of men, for “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second
time” (Wiesel— Night).
Perhaps it is our obligation then, to learn the true weight of a
million. Maybe we must feel that pressure of eleven million separate
justices and dreams in order to give wing to the imprints of their
memory. For certain, it is each of our jobs, as people educated in the
bloody lesson of the Holocaust, to cross borders that no one else can
see, to grasp hands over oceans and mountains, through language barriers
and philosophical boundaries, to spread the fundamental message and
become that one in a million who sets the ripple of change into motion.
. .
In the end, that is all we can do– for ourselves, for our future, and
for the eleven million voices who have long been silent.
Works
Cited :
1) Hilberg Raul, quoted in– The Destruction of the European Jews, rev.
ed. (New York)1985; 1:332-333
2) Goetz, Aly– Final
Solution: Nazi Population and the Murder or the European Jews (Hodder
Arnold); 1999
3) Lasik Aleksander– “The
Apprehension and Punishment of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Staff,”
from Auschwitz 1940-1945 (Auschwitz State Museum); 2000 5:59-119
4)Rees, Laurence–
Auschwitz: A New History; (U.S. edition published by PublicAffairs);
2005
5)Spielvogel, Jackson J.–
Western Civilization; Fourth Edition; (Wadsworth/Thomson Learning); 1999
6) Wiesel Elie– his Nobel
Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, Norway; December 10, 1986.
7) Wiesel Elie–
Night;(Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Girox) 2006
Works
Consulted:
1) Wiesel, Elie– Legends of Our Time (Schocken Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York); 1982
2) Wiesenthal, Simon– The Sunflower (Schocken Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York); 1997
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