When the Holocaust is not a Rock Star… (II)

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by Laura Lai/ Essay

Genocide – be it ‘Holocaust’, ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘mass slaughter’, ‘racial killing’ etc. – happened and can happen again anytime anywhere. Nobody can guarantee that genocide will not happen again. But we can diminish the probability for it to happen again. How can genocide be prevented?

            On the one side, 2/3 of the respondents (and 80 percent of the Poles) consider commemorating the Holocaust, for example, helps ensure that it will not happen again. Therefore, commemoration is one suggested stream.

            When a tragedy happens to a family or to a group of families, people usually say or think that whatever we do, nobody will bring back to the family(ies) their dear lost ones. Indeed, the caused sufferance is so deep, that everything we do can only comfort the family(ies) or those who survived. And one of the ways to bring some comfort is for as many as possible of us to pay respect by commemorating. What is commemoration? It is remembrance. People usually take a moment of silence, bring a flower, participate in a march, or give a pure thought.

            Another stream is to find, to prosecute and to convict those responsible for the sufferance caused by the genocide. This ‘making of justice’ – as we generally call it – is also meant to comfort the families who lost dear members and those who survived, who may or may never overcome the loss or the experience depending on their strength. The fact that the guilty ones were found, prosecuted and sentenced gives an insurance thought of relief that it will not happen again. And it does not happen again, at least not with the same guilty ones since they were caught and sentenced. But when genocide happens again in different parts of the world and in different cultures, it means that the death of those who were previously victims of other genocides was in vain and that we learned nothing from history – about which it is generally said that it tends to repeat itself.

            On the other side, UNESCO  considers that education could play a major role in preventing further genocides and it is a top priority for its Education 2030 Agenda. It starts from the assumption that having a public forum where youngsters can discuss past genocides can shape them to become more responsible citizens with more respect for human dignity and more tolerant to people’s racial, ethnic, religious, social, etc. differences. Therefore, education is another stream for preventing further genocides. The idea of a public forum is great, but when we are several billion inhabitating this planet and genocide can happen anywhere, anytime and its victims can be any group, we can only hope that as many as possible from the several billion can show up and discuss on this public forum about the past genocides, in order to diminish the general level of ignorance on the genocide topic.

            Advocating for remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust genocide and approaching education as the main stream for preventing further genocides is also what the U.S.Holocaust Museum is doing. But although the museum has free entrance, 80 percent of American respondents said that they never visited the museum, although 58 percent of them think that Holocaust genocide may happen again. Supposedly no youngster wants to be looked by the others as a museum freak, but rather as a common ignorant and if de facto visits to the museum are difficult – whatever the reasons of each of us – maybe should genocide remembrance museums come to its public by virtual visits and online streaming of its conferences and discussions. Interactive questions can make interested youngsters and adult people satisfy their curiosity by learning new things and finding new answers to their old questions, if any (given the fact that either the Holocaust or any other genocide is not a rock star). When 93 percent of students think that about genocide we should learn more in schools, virtual materials can be of a great help and so could be some history knowledge contests awarded with visits to concentration camps. However, every conference, event, trip to concentration camps, they all cost money.

                An initiative of the U.S. Congress, which passed on the 9^th of May 2018, called the S.447 ‘Justice for Uncompensated Survivors’, brought Polish people to streets in massive demonstrations. It refers to the return of lost properties to the rightful owners or their heirs. What caused this major demonstration in Poland – where during the Second World War functioned the biggest concentration camp – was the paragraph on heirless property: ‘in the case of heirless property, the provision of property or compensation to assist needy Holocaust survivors, to support Holocaust education, and for other purposes’. Demonstrators’ argument was that the property(ies) of those heirless become the property of the state. When something becomes the property of the state it means that it is a common good; it is the property of the whole society. Supposedly that the phrasing of ‘for other purposes’ in the paragraph on heirless property of the U.S. Congress document S.447 ‘Justice for Uncompensated Survivors’ implies also preventing genocide-related educational events, as well as educational trips to the concentrations camps in Poland, then demonstrating against it means that the society can provide alternative financial sources to finance genocide-prevention education, but usually finding alternative funding sources is difficult.

To sum up, commemorating and genocide-prevention education are two main streams, which go together, in preventing future genocides. Although, in general, funds allocated to education differ from one country to another, this public opinion poll’s results show a high level of ignorance on a topic of a general interest. And finding alternative funds for a mass-scale genocide-prevention education is not easy, because genocide is a concert of the death, which does not charge tickets to collect money, but it charges lives fee. What other streams preventing future genocides can possibly be? Public forums of a discussion and of a brainstorming character can also be supportive.