They were just like us, but we don't have to be like them.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2013

I have a picture like this from when I was at school. Friends, laughing and joking and squeezed together to CHHEEESSEEE for the camera.

They were just like us, but they stand in the shadow of the Holocaust.

The shadow of shoes,

                                 of hair,

                                       of clothes,

                                                  of bags,

                                                         of broken, twisted metal that was once a building, that held people that looked like shells of people that were once bodies of women and children and men and doctors and surgeons and shop-workers and rabbis and wives and husbands and aunts and uncles and teachers and writers and chemists and artists.

I say "Never Again" and "Not in My Lifetime".

I light candles and shed tears.

I paint and write and try to understand how it was and how it was not.

We shudder at pictures of Hitler and Goerring and Goebbels and Eichmann and Mengele.

We raise statues to those who we can never reclaim from the fires.

We stand in the shadow and try to see the sun.

I found an article in the Sun archive "Relatives of Nazi Germany's Monsters talk about How They Feel".

Monsters do not exist.

It would be much easier if they did.

6 million people were murdered in factories.

These factories were designed to reduce a human to dust.

And it happened here.

This happened in Germany, in France, in Poland, in Italy, in Czechoslavakia (as was), in Hungary and in every other country that Hitler's forces invaded. 

The American government did nothing.

The British government did nothing.  

And in 2013, we "who live save in our warm houses",

We who "returning in the evening" find "hot food and friendly faces"*,

I light a candle to those and go to bed,

With Primo Levi's book resting under the bedside lamp.

*Primo Levi - if this is a man

This is not enough. This will happen again if this is all we do. 

This happens again everytime that this is all we do.  

It is easy to look in the mirror and see a victim or a survivor - it is easy to read their stories and to see ourselves - our mother - our father - our children.

We are so quick to see the humanity in those who suffered.

It is much harder to look in the mirror and see the perpetrator.

The actions of the Nazis were monstrous, but they were not monsters.

They were men and they were women.

They were mothers and fathers. 

They were aunts and uncles,

doctors,

surgeons,

teachers,

musicians,

artists,

writers,

chemists,

shop-keepers,

factory workers,

farmers;

they were just like us.  

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
― Hannah Arendt

Today, I remember those who were lost. 

I light a candle in memory of the 6 million gone.

I look at the pictures of the camps and see the person inside the skeleton.

I look at the pictures of the Nazis and see the person inside the monster's uniform.

They were just like us.

Young women and men from the Nazi party on a training trip in the German mountains.

But we don't have to be like them.