Holocaust Victims Were Faced With The Most Perfidious Forces

Daryle Jenkins "One People's Project" Interview with Kam Williams
As the author of a Holocaust novel ("Jacob's Courage: A Holocaust Love Story"), I appreciate stories that offer a frank, emotional examination of morality. Repugnance, despair and darkness exist within human nature. We therefore learn nothing about ourselves if we do not examine this part of our psyche.

Holocaust victims were faced with the most perfidious forces. Deceit, brutality, cruelty, sickness, starvation and the death of loved-ones were the daily companions of Nazi prisoners. Yet, in the midst of this despair, there was life, love, passion, desire, religious fervor and the excitement known only to children.

Even in such hopeless desolation, there was love of God, infatuation, romance and passion and longing for all of the things that humans crave. These poor souls embellished the wide range of human attributes. Such was the complex state of being in a Nazi death camp.

If we speak only of heroic individuals battling against dark forces, then we dismiss the truth of our nature. Humans are far more complex than such generic characters imply. Not all Jews imprisoned and tortured by Nazi Germany were good. Some became "kapos," more ruthless than the SS. Not all Germans were bad. Some Germans were riddled with guilt and some expressed tender compassion for the imprisoned Jews. Yet, below the surface of brutality, we find the human instinct for life, liberty, love and compassion.

Holocaust survivors were forced to examine every aspect of life, while they endured the unendurable, waiting for a slow, torturous death. This horror led some to curse God, even while others continued to praise God. Within this impenetrable abyss, many Jews continued to live out their faith, to practice the religion as best they could. The managed to summon the courage necessary to continue living, to suffer the intolerable. They refused to allow the foundation of their society to be destroyed.

Within the Nazi camps, Jews created their own schools, orchestras, political leadership and medical clinics. On the road to certain death, they found a way to teach their children how to fulfill their religious commandments. This is profound courage seldom seen elsewhere in history. Some of the most ardent examples of constructive human nature can be found in these terrifying Holocaust stories.

We must always tell the stories of the Holocaust. They represent the devastatingly worst and the extraordinarily best examples of the human spirit. These stories instruct us to recognize the inherent evil of humanity, lest it never be allowed to rise up again. As long as we teach our progeny about the Holocaust, there is hope for the future.

The recent death of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum stands as a stark reminder that our job is not yet completed. It is our duty to teach our children the truth about the Holocaust. We cannot allow Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites to poison the minds of our offspring. For, to allow that would be to allow another Holocaust. In the words of philosopher and writer George Santayana, "Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."

Charles S. Weinblatt
Author, Jacob's Courage