Picking up from last night...

Leonard Pitts, while I don't always agree with his politics, wrote a piece a few years back concerning the opening of a dance club that opened a little over a mile from the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The strength of his words and the images they create make the piece one of my favorites even to this day. I'll post the link below and recommend you give it a few minutes of your time.

"What we saw there left us chastened, sobered, stopped . . . and determined that humanity must be more than this, better than this. The words came, unbidden. Never again, we said. Never again."

My wife's grandpa saw. As a soldier in the 103th Infantry Division he helped to liberate the concentration camps at Landsberg. Tell him that the images that still wake him over 60 years later were contrived propaganda. The liberation is well documented here.

But the old people have lived to see how impotent is our resolve, how flimsy our memory, how weak our words. They've lived to see Holocaust deniers and ethnic cleansing, the rise of neo-Nazis in Germany, white supremacists drilling with guns in the American woods. - Pitts

The cliche says, and truthfully so, that those who forget their history are destined to repeat it. But to remember only for fear of repeating it is not acceptable. There are some things that need to be remembered simply because it would be a sin to forget. Soon the witnesses will be gone, and the story that would die with them is too unbelievable, too atrocious to allow to be passed off as myth, legend or apocryphal tale. Children must learn about it in school. Parents who've heard their grandparents tell of it must not fear passing it on, generation after generation. The David Dukes of the nation and the world must be opposed by a million voices shouting "No! Not ever will you and your kind be allowed to spread such hateful venom." To forget or grow apathetic and allow the seeds of doubt to take root would be shameful.

"Fifty-five years ago, a shocked and reverent world made a promise to the survivors of the Holocaust . . . a promise that was implicit, but no less real for that. We would remember, forever. We would not allow this suffering to be in vain." - Pitts

LookSmart's FindArticles - `Never again' becomes `maybe never again'

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The, Oct 12, 2000, by LEONARD PITTS