I have seen serveral impassionned messages regarding the holocaust
museum article by Andrea Dworkin in Ms magazine.  I have not read the
article and I have not been to the holocaust museum.  I can understand
the mission and message of the museum:  when we forget we are doomed to
repeat.  This is as true of societies as it is for individuals.  When we
forget that we create governments or allow governments to be created to
represent us, we have to have connection and responsibility for our parts
or lack of participation in them.  All too often governments have hidden
agendas, covert actions, self-serving activities that erode the very
society they purport to represent.  Historically, these have been largely
male-dominated.  The histories we teach our children are the histories of
governments.  Those histories are written with a particular vantage point
(much as a subway system gives views of a city; each station acting as a
vantage point:  the city can be clearly seen, but how it appears is
changed by each vantage point).
 
Whether we have told the complete truth about any event in the past or
how that event unfolded or effected, is a matter of individual
interpretation.  The combination of those individual interpretations, can
give some insights about "how" it may have been; but it is not an
absolute.  It was not until I noticed the tatooed numbers on the arms of
a man and his wife who did survive, that I understood how personal such
stories could be.  Their hesitation in telling their stories to me, and
the emotions behind those, finally gave a personal frame in which to
understand the story.  No longer was it hundreds of thin, gaunt figures
in stripped clothes on black and white film:  it was two very real,
colourful people sitting before me.
 
It is easy to trivialize the past, to forget the horrendous loss of life,
to be overwhelmed by the great numbers of people who could easily fill a
Los Angeles, or New York City, or London, or Tokyo:  those numbers are
numbing themselves just by standing at an uptown New York subway station
on a morning rush-hour.  It is easier to approach the suffering,
extermination, torture and destruction from the inhuman killing
"machines" set up by the Nazis.  It is very clear that not just men, nor
jews, nor gypsies, nor Rumanians, were murdered in those camps:  it was
human beings, whole families: men, women, children, babies, aunts,
uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, handicapped, able, and so forth.
 
In the end it is important to understand that it was a philosophy
embodied in a government, that firmly believed that is was doing "the
right thing" by eliminating those they felt "threatened" their system and
their society:  to accomplish this end, families were murdered.  We may
believe that we have moved away from those times and that would never be
possible again, but it was human beings who design it, and human beings
who slaughtered other human beings.  We are fully capable of doing the
same. It is to this end that we should remind ourselves that we need not
forget and that we should remain vigilant.
 
Dave Wells