The importance of remembering

I was pulling the colorful flags out of the grass at the conclusion of Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust Memorial Day, when two people approached the sign explaining the significance of the flags and of the day.

Yom Hashoah commemorates the more than 11 million victims who lost their lives due to a systematic effort to eliminate specific ethnicities, religions and lifestyles between 1939 and 1945 — Jews, Soviets, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Poles, homosexuals. Each flag represented 10,000 victims, some of whose names were read during a 12-hour vigil in 1879 Arch.

Expecting a reaction of empathy and perhaps even a hint of sadness, I was surprised when I heard a snicker as the two guys walked past me. Under his breath, one of them muttered, "What about the black victims in this country?"

I almost decided not to respond to his comment. Mourning one tragedy obviously does not eliminate the realities of all others. We all know that. Every special day of mourning for a particular cause cannot actively encompass all of humanity's victims. So tonight, as I contemplated the Holocaust and the words "never forget" rang through my mind, I realized that it is my duty to respond to his comment and not remain silent, as too many people in our history have.

Black-Jewish relations have been a widely discussed issue in the recent decade as the divide increased between the two groups from their closer bond during the Civil Rights movement. The debate resurfaced on this campus among some students following Amiri Baraka's poetry reading at Café Vivian a few weeks ago. Baraka, an influential figure in the black reparations movement, participated in the prelude to the University's Civil Rights Conference. Many Jewish students felt uncomfortable by Baraka's anti-Semitic provocation, for example paralleling the victims of the Nazis with the Nazis themselves. While a large part of the university community believe that even the most hate-provoking individuals must be allowed to exercise the right of freedom of speech, the promotion of belligerent, rather than friendly, relations has already begun to take its toll.

As two historically oppressed peoples, black and Jews should understand each others' past tragedies and regard them with respect, rather than with malice or sarcasm.

Perhaps, however, the inability to mourn for other peoples' traumas is an indication of a bigger problem, a problem that this whole university suffers from: inability see beyond ourselves.

The Holocaust ended 58 years ago, in the lifetime of many of our parents and all of our grandparents. True, we, personally, do not recognize the smell of gas chambers, the taste of starvation, the emotion of losing eight children — but the smell is still in the air. We also know that in order to improve the future we must learn from the past; the only way to learn from the past is to remember it.

Why is it, then, that only 30 people thought that commemorating 11 million lives at a memorial service was worth their ten minutes? I suppose the myriad of procrastination methods we all use were more interesting and fun than this one. Football. Frisbee. TV. IM. Stairmaster. Or perhaps we allowed our political views about Iraq or Israel or America to taint our perception of an unrelated historical tragedy. The majority of us say that we are here at Princeton to make a difference in the world. What difference can we make when we are too self-involved and insulated to truly care and make an effort to remember?

I have two hopes for the near future — unrelated, perhaps, but too important to single just one of them out. First, that we restart the black-Jewish dialogue so that next year Jewish students can celebrate Black History Month and black students can participate in Holocaust memorial services without each feeling that his or her personal history is being slighted. Second, I hope that the Princeton community will soon learn the importance of actively remembering, even if it means less time for tanning in the sun.

As I called back to the guy with the flags, he just laughed and said, "just joking" in a sardonic tone. It is these kinds of "jokes" that eventually allow intolerance to fester into extreme cases of anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and homophobia. We are all better than that, I hope.

In Israel, the Holocaust Memorial Day is called Yom Ha'Shoah v'Hagvurah, "Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day." Instead of naming it solely for the victims, they chose to commemorate the bravery of those who stood up in the face of evil and allowed the human spirit to prevail. We, on this campus, can also rise to the challenge if only we tried just a little bit harder.