I’m told that history repeats itself. When I was 9 years
old my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, visited my elementary
school. He showed my classmates a photo of himself taken after his
liberation from the Dachau concentration camp ““ he weighed
barely 90 pounds and had lost his wife and son.
In my mind, this was history: human, painful and entirely
unforgettable. Years later, when I learned of the tragedies in
Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor and most recently Sudan, I realized the
depth of this repetition. So I was astonished to discover last week
that the European Union is considering following Germany’s
lead to ban all Nazi symbols.
This approach is a dramatically misguided one. European Union
leaders cite the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as
well as rising anti-Semitism throughout Europe as their source of
inspiration. But the legacy of the Holocaust cannot just be erased.
It must persist, unabated, for international challenge and
memory.
There’s been an uneasy, albeit complicated, relationship
between Europe and the Holocaust for over half a century now. The
truth is that most nations don’t know how to deal with the
tragedy’s total of almost 11 million innocent victims.
Controversies abound, whether they regard reparations, grave sites
or Swiss bank accounts.
This week, however, Europe has no choice but to confront a
bloody history. The bittersweet 60th anniversary looms heavy over
the continent.
Truth be told, “the Europeans are very touchy about
letting people say whatever they want precisely because they know
what it has led to in the past,” wrote history Professor
Peter Baldwin in an e-mail.
But the biggest question Baldwin proposes is this: “How
can we have both free speech and consideration for others,
especially groups who have suffered tremendously in the past
because of prejudice?”
When I first studied the Holocaust in the eighth grade, my
classmates and I watched a movie called “The Hangman.”
The premise of the film revolved around the public hanging of a man
in a small, unknown town.
Every day, another town member was hung and not a soul spoke up
against the act. Eventually, nobody was left ““ except for the
hangman, of course.
We learned a very important lesson from that film. Many people
all over the world, including within the United States, knew (at
least had some vague understanding) of what was occurring in
Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz. “The Pentagon knew, the
State Department knew, the White House knew, most governments knew.
Only the victims did not know,” Elie Wiesel said in a speech
at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., in 1993.
And yet, like the tragedy of the hangman’s tale, their
mouths were kept shut. Choices were made not to bomb the gas
chambers or even the railroads leading to the camps.
Unfortunately, I can’t alter history. But I can advocate
free and open discussion. Therefore, Nazi symbols, though cruel and
painful, should be controlled rather than outlawed. They must
remain for the sake of free speech as well as historical
honesty.
Perhaps the noblest way to treat history ““ and this
particular kind of history ““ is by making it visible and
well-known.
I’m a student of history myself, and I often contemplate
how the past should be most appropriately represented.
Today, I write about a history that is very much my own. It is
like a member of my family, indelibly present and irrevocable. And
it cannot be made illegal or stored away until the wounds have
diminished. The wounds will never disappear.
Instead, they should be made available, so as to help prevent
future global crises.
Wiesel, during his speech in 1993, begged President Bill Clinton
to go beyond the events of the 1930s and 40s and to look toward the
future, in which conflicts still abound.
He brought up the crisis that he had witnessed the previous fall
raging in the former Yugoslavia, stating, “I cannot sleep
since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying we must do
something to stop the bloodshed in that country!”
This is the beginning of my own kind of questioning. Like
Wiesel, I cannot fathom a sweeping away, an “end” to
the Holocaust.
And I simply cannot support a banning of its history, whether it
be through the erasure of museums, history books or the hateful
groups and their symbols that helped incite the atrocities many
years ago.
The legacy of Nazism extends beyond laws and reason, and it must
remain ““ like the grim reminder found in my
grandfather’s photograph.
Fried is a second-year history student. E-mail her at
ifried@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.