WASHINGTON — The 60th anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz by the Red Army as it pursued the retreating Nazis is
upon us. It is perhaps a good occasion for me to recall what has
been one of the strongest formative influences on my political
point of view, the Holocaust. I learned about it in early grammar
school under peculiar circumstances
In the seventh and eighth grades in the mid-1950s I was an
unruly student. Particularly when the teacher would demand of her
class “silence,” I became oddly loquacious. Thus I was forever
being banished to the back of the room, where behind a partition of
some sort the teacher maintained her third “library,” piles of old
magazines such as Life and Look that featured
photographs of current events. As my school was a Catholic grammar
school, we had regular classes in religion, the grisliest moments
of which were when our teacher told us about how the Romans
martyred the early Christians.
It was after one of these lectures that I made the discovery
that marked my political views indelibly. I was sent off to the
“library,” with my head full of tortured and murdered bodies from
some gruesome Roman slaughter in the Coliseum. Inevitably I turned
to the pages of Life and Look , and there I
discovered still more tortured and murdered bodies. There were
piles of corpses, shirtless men with skeletal upper bodies exposed,
and American soldiers, cigarettes dangling from their mouths,
greeting the survivors. Faraway Romans had not committed this
atrocity, German European totalitarians had.
As you have doubtless perceived, I was reading old magazine
reports of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The
confluence of my teacher’s lectures on ancient Roman atrocities and
those magazines reporting on atrocities that had been carried out
just a decade before impressed forever on my mind the horror that
mankind can wreak on a minority if not restrained by the laws and a
Bill of Rights. It happened in the Holocaust against Jews. It
happened in the Gulag against political dissenters and simple
unfortunates.
There is more to my early experience of the Holocaust. The fact
that popular magazines from the early 1950s still featured the
pictures of starved and murdered inmates of Nazi concentration
camps suggests, at least to me, that there was an awareness back
then of what terrible things were done to European Jews in World
War II. But the awareness waned. Of that I am sure because of the
tremendous reaction in the late 1970s after the mini-series
“Holocaust” was televised to a national audience. Again I saw the
starved inmates, the appalling instruments of torture and murder,
and the heartache. For some twenty years most Americans had
forgotten this savage period of a brutal government’s attempt at
genocide in the heart of modern Europe.
Since then we have done a pretty good job of remembering. There
have been books and poignant films such as “Schindler’s List.” In
Washington there is the Holocaust Museum. Now there is this
commemoration of Auschwitz. But there is also in Europe a rising
tide of anti-Semitism. There is the United Nations where
anti-Semitic diatribes and literature flourish. And in the Middle
East anti-Semitism is a matter of government policy in many
regimes.
So it is important to remember the evil of the Nazis. It took
decades to rouse ourselves to think about the Holocaust. It is
about time we rouse ourselves to think about the Gulag too. And
perhaps it is about time to confront the ruthless disregard for the
dignity of man that goes on at the United Nations today. What this
means to me is that our schools should teach history as the serious
subject that it is. The Holocaust really took place, as did the
Gulag. Our Constitution restrains such behavior. That it did not
restrain slavery until the middle of the 19th century should remind
us of how fragile a regard for human dignity can be. A clear
understanding of history, political history at least, informs us
there is a time to act if freedom is to be preserved. President
George W. Bush is not considered a bookish man, but he must know
his history. The time to act on behalf of freedom is now. He is
answering history’s call.
