Holocaust Memorial
How Is it That We Should Remember?
Sometimes the only thing that we can do to help remedy a terrible wrong is to serve as witnesses. And if we cannot be actual witnesses, then we struggle to find some way to serve the same function in a different way, very often by visiting a memorial to what has happened. If we cannot have been there ourselves, then we can travel there -- wherever that there is -- in spirit and in our hearts we can help ensure that the world does not forget. One of those events that many people seek to ensure such a remembrance of by visiting memorials is the Holocaust. There are memorials to the millions who were slaughtered by Nazi Germany -- mostly Jews, but also others like Gypsies and the disabled -- all over the world, even in places that are far away from where the actual killings occurred. But such events, in which so much innocent blood was spilled, spread their tentacles out across the world until there is no one, no square inch, that is not affected.
Memorials serve different functions. They allow people to serve as ongoing witnesses, as noted above. They also help people achieve a certain degree of catharsis. Catharsis is a concept that comes originally from...
The children surrounding the woman are holding hands and moving in her direction. She is a figurehead, a positive role model for change. In its entirety, the memorial represents the empowerment of individual women and of women collectively. The memorial suggests that as we have more powerful female role models, we can achieve the goal of a global egalitarian society that does not tolerate or tacitly condone any type
Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. is a place that is both dark and light, from the perspective of a visitor and the emotions that one feels on being in a place like this. The darkness results from the facts and photographs that are on display. It is very difficult to believe that these events took place just over seventy years ago in Europe, and that Adolf Hitler's Nazi party conducted
One resistance fighter was Anna Heilman, who helped smuggle minute amounts of gunpowder out of a plant at Auschwitz to help create a bomb to destroy one of the crematoriums at the concentration camp. She remembers, "We smuggled the gunpowder from the factory into the camp. It was smuggled in tiny little pieces of cloth, tied up with a string. Inside our dresses we had what we called a
Holocaust Memory in East and West Germany Introduction In Bernhard Schlink’s Guilt about the Past, the author writes about it what it is like to live under the “long shadow of the past” (26). Schlink states that the Germans felt oppressed by this guilt that their soldiers committed. They are happy to forget it, for example, when the German soccer team scores a goal at the World Cup and shouts, “We are
For one, the cover art used for each of these media formats is remarkably -- and perhaps not coincidentally -- similar. Spiegelman's graphic novel cover depicts a large white circle front and center. On this white circle is a Nazi swastika with a cat face at its center. The title "Maus" is written in a bloody red font, and below the white circle are characters -- perhaps Vladek and
However, seeing those bags of shaved prisoner hair, I came to understand how much of the impetus for the Holocaust was financial. Hitler may have had an irrational, psychotic hatred of Jews, but the Holocaust could not have occurred with the systemic dehumanization of a group of people. The Nazis harvested Jews for body parts. They used their bones for fertilizer and, as proven by the bags of hair,
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