To forget or remember

Last week I had the privilege of talking to a group of visitors from Warkworth, North of Auckland, at the Holocaust Centre. They were older people from a retirement village and I had to think of something different to talk about from my talks to school students, which usually relate to specific topics within the curriculum areas. So I talked about why the Holocaust Centre came into being. For many years people didn't talk about the Holocaust. Survivors wanted to move on with their lives and didn't want to relive their horrendous experiences, people at large found the accounts of the Holocaust too troubling and disturbing and simply didn't want to be upset. Survivors didn't want to talk, but they also found that people didn't want to listen, didn't want to know inconvenient truths. A generation later, fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a younger generation became interested in the horrendous events that their parents tried to forget. So when we had a service in the synagogue commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz the synagogues was almost full, but largely full of people I didn't know, people who were not part of the Jewish community. This event that brought home to me that the Holocaust touched a great many lives, not just Jewish lives, and that it was not a Jewish story, it was a universal, or at least a Western European story. The rest is history. I tapped on the shoulder some very able people, we formed a committee to establish a Holocaust Centre, which has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. Visitors, school groups come from all corners of the,  country, visitors from overseas compliment it on the way its small space is used to bring home the essential account of the Holocaust, and make this relevant to New Zealand here and now. But the question of remembering continues to be in the forefront of our thinking. The stories of survivors are important, but those killed must not be forgotten. 'Never again' is too simplistic a lesson. We need to talk about the nature of civilization, and in particular, about the disintegration of a liberal, enlightened culture that unravelled in the wake of the First World War and the events that preceded it. The ideals embodied in the French Revolution, 'Liberty, Fraternity, Equality', which largely underpinned the consensus of European culture in the nineteenth century, were subverted. They were sacrificed to causes like Nationalism, Communism, Racial superiority, dreams of past glory, and to achieve the goals of these causes whatever means were needed were justified to attain the greater end. Talking to the present generation about the Holocaust we have to talk not only about the horrendous tragedy, but also question the values we hold, explore their relevance, and understand the underlying principles of Western civilization and its consensus about the ideals of European liberalism.