The World Is Not Learning Anything

"I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't."
-Elie Wiesel

Every time I watch this video, that statement brings absolute tears to my eyes, sends electricity across my skin. To hear Wiesel say that so definitively, so sadly--it is truly heartbreaking.

The J-term class I took in my sophomore year was a Holocaust history class, taught by one of my favorite professor Holocaust history, and German history in general, was his "specialty," and I feel very grateful--to this day--that I was able to take that course with him.

On the first day of this class, as with his other classes, this professor would give us a quiz so that we could assess how much we did, and did not, know about the subject, but additionally so we could gauge how much we could expect to learn. In this particular class, I was amazed in this first day that there was so much that I didn't know. I was amazed how much the general public did not know about the Holocaust.

I didn't know the names of the six death camps. Majdanek, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, as well as Auschwitz, the one that everyone knows.

I didn't know that all of these death camps were in Poland. That Poland lost was the country that lost the most Jews, 90%. That the total death toll of the Jews, because of the Holocaust, was six million. [Six million...]

I didn't know about the resistances, the uprising at the Warsaw ghetto, at Auschwitz, at Sobibor.

I didn't know a lot of things.

It saddens me very much that Elie Wiesel is so right in that first statement, that things should have changed, and that they didn't. The Jews cried, "Never again," and they meant it.

The world cried, "Never again," and it didn't. Not at all.

We still wonder how much information was given to the American government, with respect to the Holocaust, before we became involved in World War II. The Holocaust was not our impetus for joining. Just as with World War I, it took a personal injury, an attack on our people, to force us to enter the war.

We still wonder how much information was given to the American government, to the UN, about the genocide in Rwanda. In.

In Darfur, today. Right now.

One of the most powerful statements made by my professor was that the only good thing that could have possibly come out of the Holocaust was that, in the beginning, it seemed to slow and reverse the engines of a 2000 year trend of antisemitism. But look around. Blood libel--one of the most rampant displays of pre-Holocaust antisemitism--persisted. Holocaust denial, which is probably the most common form of modern antisemitism, is a belief that many well-known people carry. Mel Gibson made antisemitic comments at his drunken arrest last summer. Pat Buchanan is a known Holocaust denier. Men like David Irving can say what they please, in America, about the Holocaust--even going so far as to compare it to Tay Sachs as a "Jewish disease that causes blindness".

The Holocaust could have stopped antisemitism, but it didn't. It could have made us more aware about our surroundings, about the costs of hate and indifference, but it didn't.

It didn't.

Wiesel is one hundred percent correct, unfortunately. The world has not learned anything, and--unfortunately--does not look likely to learn now, or anytime soon.