What I learned about Auschwitz from my inbox

What a hornet’s nest NDP candidate Alex Johnstone poked when she said she didn’t know what “Auschwitz” was. After I wrote about her, my inbox was packed with absurdities, idiocies, violent suggestions, wisdom and revelations. It filled up like a Timbits carton on a cross-Canada family car trip, if someone had a sensational nosebleed at the Manitoba border.

On one thing readers and I agree: the universities Johnstone attended are at fault, much more than this well-meaning Hamilton West— Ancaster-Dundas candidate, if in fact she was being truthful about “Auschwitz” meaning nothing to her. Yet UBC, Western and McMaster haven’t apologized.

University doesn’t just begin in September and end on a rainy April day four years later. It’s merely a starting point for students learning how much they don’t know and becoming curious about the world, filling their mental backpack with shared knowledge, prepped for a lifetime of reading and learning.

Hey, you in the back of the class, pull those white cords out of your ears. Several people have since told me, clear-eyed, that they don’t know what Auschwitz is. OK, I said, trying not to look aghast, which is my resting face these days. What bothered me was that they said “No,” rather than “No, what is it?” and therein lies the problem.

One reader, R. of Stratford, told me he had visited Dachau and found it gloomy. An intelligent reader, I thought. He nattered on, wishing to alert me to a news story. Apparently Muslims are invading North America and western Europe and demanding the Canadian anthem be available in Arabic and citizenship granted while covering their faces. “Would it not be possible for you and the Star to conduct an investiga- tion to see if, in fact, the Muslims are attempting to take over Canada, the U.S.A.?” etc.

Thanks for the hot tip, I said. I’ll get right on that, alert the investigative team, reporters are already streaming out the door to international capitals as I type.

Another reader told me he’d had a 38-year-old girlfriend who admitted she’d never heard of Chairman Mao or the Cultural Revolution. “How does this happen?” he asked. “Dealbreaker,” I told him. You can’t sleep with people that stupid.

Marriages only survive when people are at the same intellectual level. In 2008, White House press secretary Dana Perino admitted she didn’t know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure,” she said later. She’s at Fox now.

It’s like the old “she thought Pearl Harbor was a lounge singer.” Nothing kills a moment like realizing a girlfriend thinks the Maginot Line is a French raincoat designer or a boyfriend thinks the Beveridge Report is the liquor store’s monthly magazine. The wedding’s off. Then we come to those who knew their history so well they extrapolated. One reader wrote of Poland’s sensitivity about Nazi camps being built on their land, while acknowledging Poland’s long anti-Semitic history. Another said gays were murdered too, why hadn’t I mentioned them. An Orthodox Jew said young people of his faith were not that interested in the Nazi era.

Several e-mailers said it all happened 70 years ago and not in Canada, so why teach it? One said, “What about the Armenian holocaust? The slaughter in Cambodia? Why do we obsess about only one holocaust?”

I have answers for them, the obvious ones, that Hitler’s war would have enslaved the planet and was the most destructive war ever fought, that history teaches us how to prevent a small group of humans, such as the Jews, being surrounded, hounded, tortured and murdered-- in-bulk ever again. We should extrapolate from Auschwitz to prevent its repetition.

But the fragmentation of these responses interested me. Repeatedly, people said the slaughter of six million Jews didn’t include their issues, their hobby horse, so what did it have to do with them?

Me, me, me. This is a new aspect of our era, the obsession with self. It originated in the American 1960s and blossomed: self-promotion, self-esteem, self-help, self-worth, self-indulgence, selfie.

Unless you were there, the story of Auschwitz is not about you. It’s about the future, what people like you might do when offered a chance at extreme violence. Then it was Jews, now it’s Muslims. So. Auschwitz essay due at 9 a.m. on Friday, no exceptions, I will fail you. If only students were manhandled this way, the Johnstone debacle wouldn’t have happened, instructive as it has been. hmallick@thestar.ca