Every day I think about what I learned during my time in Germany last month. Sometimes it’s hard to wrap my head around it …or there will be details that I forget and will need to look up online. I am still surprised by the sheer magnitude of the whole Nazi operation: how quickly it seeped and spread into every day life, how willing people were to abandon their morals and humanity, and how easily one could be erased. How could one man be the start and end of something that horrific? I haven’t come any closer to understanding.
I wonder if the trajectory of history would have been different if more people pushed back. I think about the non-Jewish German women who fought for their Jewish husbands when they went missing from their factory jobs in Berlin. They were released and it proved that small instances of resistance made huge impacts. But then I remember people gladly paid entry to the Nazi rallies to celebrate and women were physically subjected to those drunk men. Are people just weak? Am I? I wonder what I can be doing, now, to bring about change in my own life.
Lastly, it’s no surprise the concept of memory culture kept creeping into my thoughts as we made our way through Germany. It is everywhere: from the colossal Nazi rally grounds to the almost missable Stolersteine on various corners. “A person is only forgotten if their name is forgotten.”
All over Germany there are monuments, museums, and memorials to those terrible years of persecution. Some broad to encompass the massive number of casualties and some small to specifically deal with the individual. Without these places for remembrance can and will we continue to reconcile and mourn the loss of millions of people? From several conversations I discovered that behind closed doors, there is a calling for less remembrance. A society of people that weren’t alive and don’t represent that period. I fear a time when the genocide of my people just becomes another forgotten stain on the history of humanity.