To understand

I was reading an article the other day about Iran and the bomb. The article naturally discussed Israel's alternatives. It made me think about The Holocaust. Have people already forgot? Iran, and various other organisation such as Hamas, is saying openly that Israel must be wiped of from the map. The state of Israel must be destroyed.

I find it appalling that the world is so silence about this. Should we have a second Holocaust happening in one lifetime? I know that people read about the Holocaust, or they used to anyway. But are they reading it the wrong way? Maybe they read it but don't understand it? They don't comprehend the enormity of the mass murders. Or maybe they do. They understand that the Holocaust only could have happened because the ordinary man on the street didn't do anything about it. And the reader know that he or she is that same ordinary man today. The responsibility is huge for everyone. There's no escape.

I came to think about the superb book about the Holocaust by Saul Friedländer: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Vol 2). In the introduction, Friedländer is talking about a photograph of David Moffie. The photograph is on his graduation day in September of 1942 in Amsterdam. He has been awarded a degree in medicine, MD.

"On the left hand of his jacket Moffie displays a palm-size Jewish star with the word Jood inscribed on it. Moffie was the last Jewish student from the University of Amsterdam under German occupation."

Friedländer ends the introduction, several pages later with:

Let us return to Moffie's photograph, to the star sewed to his coat, with its repulsive inscription, and to its meaning: The new MD, like all the carriers of this sign, was to be wiped of the face of the earth. Once its portent is understood this photograph triggers disbelief. Such disbelief is a quasivisceral reaction, one that occurs before knowledge rushes in to smother it. "Disbelief" here means something that arises from the depth of one's immediate perception of the world, of what is ordinary and what remains "unbelievable". The goal of historical knowledge is to domesticate disbelief, to explain it away. In this book I wish to offer a thorough historical study of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, without eliminating or domesticating that initial sense of disbelief.

I read this powerful book and it made me realise the responsibility everyone has to understand history, not just to read it.