Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. A number of years ago (2008 actually) I was privileged to spend some time in Israel and got to visit the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Located on the Mount of Remembrance, Yad Vashem is a 45-acre campus with nine interactive galleries using personal items, testimonials, and documents to tell the story of the Holocaust and preserve the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah; one and a half million of which were children.
I saw some survey results published in January of 2022 by CTV Atlantic news revealing that about one-third of North American students feel the Holocaust was fabricated or exaggerated.
I also remember several years prior to that hearing of a study reporting that 43% of Canadians could not name even one concentration camp from the Holocaust. I doubt those stats have improved since. And this is true while some survivors are still alive to tell about it! It can make ‘never again’ sound a little hollow.
I can’t help but think that the source of this kind of ignorance is due to history as a subject being relegated to the back of the school bus. All the focus seems to be forward as we speed into an uncertain future! History is only for those who seem to have an interest.
I have more than an interest in history. I have an interest in people. Partly because I have a seasoned conviction that other people, regardless of where or when they have lived their lives are pretty much just like me. That even those who lived long, long ago, (and even far, far away) lived every bit as much as you and me – craved love, feared pain, dreamed dreams, were at times frustrated and at times elated, confused, amused, had ideas, danced and sang, worked and worshipped, experienced disillusionment at times and hope at others. When I show little interest in history I am confessing that the lives of my parents and their parents before them, and the generations preceding me for thousands of years, do not really matter a whole lot to me. And that just can’t be right! In some sense the degree to which I understand history is the degree to which I understand myself. It depends on my appreciation for the sea of humanity in which I am not an island.
The attitude that seems to represent the current sentiment is one of dismissal. But no marker defines (or defiles) a generation (or a person) like the ignorance of or distain for one’s own history. And it could be argued that no other scenario presents as great a danger either. And the litmus test for it could probably be a lack of respect for our elders, the conviction drilled into you by your parents mostly especially that older people deserve an extra measure of respect, partly because they know important stuff that you don’t. They had been around. They ‘didn’t just fall off the turnip wagon yesterday’ as my dad might say.
But there is a lot of what C. S. Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery’. Which he defined as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”
You were born into a point on a storyline that has already been unfolding for many thousands of years. What do you know really if you are ignorant of the past? I had a teacher one time who told me that history was everything. Over the years I have considered more and more what she meant. I don’t think history is everything. But then I have to remember that history is everything that has ever happened!
And it’s collectively true. By that I mean that our society as a whole has been shaped over time into what it is today, pop culture and all! And it’s time for a book plug – ‘The Air We Breathe’ by Glen Schriverner; highly recommended. And there are some hefty historians who have also weighed in on the pervasive influence of the past (our Christian past in particular) and the elements within current culture and world affairs that owe a great debt to our Christian forbearers. Consider recent work by prominent historians like Tom Holland, George Marsden, Alister McGrath, Rodney Stark, Charles Taylor to name a few.
Our day is the day of the internet and confirmation bias and algorithms and artificial intelligence we have information exploding, misinformation, disinformation … that’s a lot to contend with. It’s not as if propaganda is new. The KGB mastered propaganda long before there was anything like the internet. But the internet has served as a seedbed for disinformation to thrive and grow like nothing seen before. We are living in a propaganda deluge. Revisionist history is attempting to rewrite the past in an attempt to create new narratives for our lives; ones based not on what actually happened, but fabricated according to self-interest. It’s a dangerous game to play.
I got to spend a few hours inside the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem in February of 2008 surrounded by more artifacts than I’d seen before or since. I can assure you it all happened without exaggeration. But it’s getting harder and harder to say never again. The only hope is the Hope of the ages.