Can ‘never forget’ lead to ‘never again’?
We lost Sam Grundman a year ago at the age of 97. Sam was my mother’s first cousin, but to me he was my “Uncle Sam.” He was a Holocaust survivor who spent years as a slave laborer in a Nazi munitions factory. Short of being killed, he lived through the horrors, cruelty, starvation and suffering the Nazis were so aptly capable of. He lost his parents, a brother, three sisters and dozens more close relatives. He told me about the last days of my grandparents and other relatives sent to Treblinka, along with his family.
No amount of reading or watching films and documentaries could make my understanding of the Holocaust more impactful than listening to Sam tell about his experiences. From the first time, when I was a teenager, to the last time in my 70s, his account never varied in detail. Not long ago, I asked him how he could remember every aspect of what happened, even in his 90s. His answer shocked me. “It’s what I think about when I fall asleep, and when I get up.”
The words “Never Forget” are often cited in reference to the Shoah. What is it that I remember? I remember that the details Sam recounted reached into my very core. They filled me with rage, sorrow and hate, all at the same time. They also filled me with wonder as to how Sam, and the others in my family who survived, could even go on with their lives. How could they put their horrific experiences behind them, and still not give into the ease of forgetting?
Seventy-two years after World War II’s end, there are only a handful of people still alive who can recount their own dreadful experiences. Will there be power in remembrance when these eyewitnesses to suffering are gone? Can I relay Sam’s account with the same impact on my descedants that it had on me?
I have known about Auschwitz my whole life. Sam’s wife was among the survivors I have known with numbers on their forearms. Yet it was not until a recent overseas trip that my feet touched the ground at Auschwitz where people took their last steps, that the enormity of what happened there truly sunk in.
It is perplexing that with the existence of eyewitnesses to the atrocities and Auschwitz for the world to see, that multiple genocides have been repeated since WWII, and three even exist today. We can even observe that anti-Semitism has again reared its ugly head. All this has happened despite the existence of Holocaust museums, preserved concentration camps, myriad books and films that depicted the events, crimes and suffering of the Holocaust.
Sam read The New York Times cover to cover each day until just a few days before he died at the end of November in 2016, weeks after the presidential election. He remarked to his daughter, shortly before he died, that current events bore a striking resemblance to what preceded the Holocaust.
This prompts the question whether to “Never Forget” is enough to achieve “Never Again.”