Today is yom hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day.
I was born in 1968, 23 short years after the end of the Holocaust. (For comparison, 9/11 was 17 years ago. Think about how close that feels.)
I grew up surrounded- and I do mean surrounded, by living survivors, some of whom were younger than I am now, hearing their first hand stories of life and death in the ghettos and camps. None of the movies I've seen, and I've seen pretty much all of them, even came close to touching on the horror of these accounts: the violence and egregious sadism enacted upon women, children, men and families is somehow uncaptureable on film.
I've heard first hand tellings of infants ripped from their mothers' arms, and literally, physically ripped apart by laughing SS guards before their suddenly silenced bodies were tossed onto a pile; I've heard first hand accounts of witnesses who watched as a young SS sat casually on the edge of an open pit, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he fired a tripod mounted machine gun into line after line of the naked bodies of Jewish fathers, mothers and children who held hands for the last time.
I carry these and other painfully lucid memories, many of them as if they were my own. I am a child of these stories. For those of us who are aware, we're watching what looks alot like a repeat of what led to the first Shoah.
This is why we say #NeverForget. #NeverAgain.