The limits of knowing history

This morning, January 27, an article which appears to be several years old [gift] popped up in the version of the New York Times which their algorithm deigns to show me. (You do know that we all get slightly different online versions of the "paper of record" in our digital feeds, don't you? Just part of life in our current mediated information environment.)

The Nazi's human death factory at Auschwitz (Poland) was liberated by the Soviet Russian army on January 27, 1945. The article is a thoughtful survey of what has happened to memory of the atrocities of a previous generation. 

... as the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, an occasion being marked by events around the world and culminating in a solemn ceremony at the former death camp on Monday that will include dozens of aging Holocaust survivors, Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is worried.

“More and more we seem to be having trouble connecting our historical knowledge with our moral choices today,” he said. “I can imagine a society that understands history very well but does not draw any conclusion from this knowledge.”

In this current political moment, he added, that can be dangerous. ... With the very notion of the truth and facts under assault in increasingly polarized societies, control over the historical narrative is yet another battlefield.

This cuts to the quick for me. I understand the human present through memory and interpretation and re-interpretation of what I know of what has gone before. And yes, history makes for both material and moral lessons. I cannot imagine trying to understand the world around me without the lens of history. 

Yet I am well aware most Americans live without much historical awareness. Where do people find a moral compass? I don't know. I try to retain mine.

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A couple of years ago, I explored the strange phenomenon which is US "Holocaust Education." Too much of this operates as a comforting morality play about distant lands whose enormity reinforces contemporary ignorance. That piece still reads well.

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And today I can make the same recommendation I always make on the subject of the memory of 20th century Nazi barbarism: find a copy of the memoir from Gerda Weissmann (later Klein), All But My Life. Ms. Weissmann was one of lucky (??) few; the Nazis transported her to a series of slave labor camps while killing all her family and eradicating the world she had known. It is brutal, simple, and totally approachable at nearly 80 years distance.