Many children of survivors share a grave concern that the memory of the Holocaust will be wiped out–and so history will be doomed to repeat itself. A new book by New York Times reporter Judith Miller suggests that in some of the very countries where atrocities occurred, the memory has already been so wrapped in myth that it might as well be forgotten, and in others the terrible truth cannot be forgotten because it has never really been faced. Miller looked at five European countries and the United States, studying the ways people revise and rationalize in an effort to insulate themselves. Here are some of the findings reported in her book, One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust:
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8 Germany: During the 1950s West Germany consciously deemphasized the events of the recent past lest they exacerbate East-West cold-war tensions. Consequently, a whole generation grew up practically ignorant of their country’s deeds. More recently, prominent German writers have argued, among other things, that Hitler was justified in “interning” the Jews, that the massacre of Jews was no different and no worse than other genocidal activities, such as Pol Pot’s savagery in Cambodia, and that, in any event, it’s time to “draw a line” at the bottom of the account. Until recently East Germany insisted that West Germany alone was responsible for the murder of Jewish citizens.
8 France: Banking heavily on the country’s image as the preeminent staunch resister of the Nazi occupation, French historians largely ignore the country’s centuries-old anti-Semitism. In all, 25 percent of French Jews were deported to concentration camps with the aid of the nation’s police and citizenry. On two days alone in the summer of 1942, some 8,200 Parisian Jews were rounded up and sent off. Though the myth of a glorious, united resistance was shattered somewhat by the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie and by powerful films such as Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, Miller says most young French people appear terminally bored with history.
