“Never Again” Means “Never Forget.”

Eighty years ago, Auschwitz was liberated. Today, Holocaust Remembrance Day matters more than ever.

Photo by Eelco Böhtlingk on Unsplash.

It seems incredible that eighty years on, the lessons of the Holocaust are just as important today as ever they were. If humankind had moved beyond the constraints, ignorance, and misery of violence, murder, and genocide, perhaps the Holocaust could have been relegated to the history books, something to be taught as a matter of course but not remembered.

Not commemorated.

Unfortunately, as the events of the last few years have made all too clear, humankind has not moved beyond the dreadful moral failings that hamstring us in every generation.

Antisemitism, humanity’s old nemesis, is as virulent as ever, resurgent and finding new hosts in the unsuspecting minds of college students in the United States, most of whom probably believe something along the lines of “words are violence.”

But as any of the dwindling numbers of concentration camp survivors could tell us: Only violence is violence. Survivors of the horrific October 7th terrorist attack in Israel would tell the same story.

Mass violence — premeditated, industrialized, organized, and perpetuated systematically is the purest distillation of violence, a virulent, corrosive, hateful force more destructive…