I’ve been thinking some more about our discussion in class yesterday. I wasn’t especially coherent at the time, but I think now I know what I was trying to say.

Simply remembering an event like the Holocaust is no guarantee that it won’t happen again. Memory is subjective, revisionist, and easily manipulated. Although saying so is a little cliché, history does tend to repeat itself.

But even so, I do believe in preserving details. Facts are cold, lifeless. They enable trivialization and give you everything except what is needed most to effect change: an emotional connection. Do I think preserving history, both statistical and emotional, is going to help the world become a better place? Of course not. But like Dr. Scanlon, I believe that while society is not likely to progress, individuals can. And providing these important details is the best way to impact individuals and persuade them to care.

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One final note. At the risk of sounding callous, it appears to be very “in vogue” to be personally horrified and emotionally affected by the Holocaust, despite the fact hardly anyone alive now was actually there. I can understand shock and sadness about the loss of so many lives and the atrocities that were committed, but to take this reaction to such emotional extremes without even being directly affected by the events themselves… well that just seems artificial to me.

My dad’s side of the family–the Jewish side–moved here from eastern Europe in the early 1900′s. We know they came from Lithuania and Hungary, but not much else. My grandparents went on a trip to those countries several years ago, hoping to find family members descended from the ones who didn’t come over to America. But either they moved away or–and this is much more likely–were all shipped off and killed during World War II.

Discussing the Holocaust always leaves me feeling very conflicted. My immediate family weren’t involved, and I never had a chance to know the ones who were, if they were. But as an act against the Jewish people as a whole, the Holocaust leaves me fairly outraged. This is odd, because I don’t consider myself religious at all, and I’m not even part of any large Jewish community, here or at home. However, I guess I still see myself as a Jew not by religion but by culture. My mother is English, coupled with some branch of Christianity or other, and even as a weird cultural-religious hybrid, I still associate most strongly with the Jewish people.

I am outraged, upset, pessimistic. But I’m not personally offended, or even especially emotionally involved, if it’s possible to make that distinction between vague, widespread emotion and more personal, individual feelings. Despite my family’s involvement, my heritage, and my culture, the Holocaust lacks close emotional impact for me because it’s something that I feel I can never fully grasp. I haven’t experienced it firsthand. How could I possibly know enough to be devastated by it? You can’t force emotions out of events that have not closely touched you. I almost feel that I have no right to be that closely and intimately affected by it because I have no idea what living through something like that means.

Such reactions are dishonest and an insult to the people who do know what it’s like.