Teaching History Matters

I’ve just returned from a homecoming of sorts, and truth be told, I’m kind of wiped out. Yes, the emotion that is summoned when recalling my old friends, now gone, liberating solders and noble survivors alike, is powerful enough to carry me away every time, but lately in a manner that conjures up joy as well as sorrow at the loss. The memory of the lives they rebuilt after the war, the recounting of the trauma that both survivor and soldier contended with brings forth the memory of one tanker, who landed on D-Day, who told a student audience at my high school, “I’m listed in the program as a liberating soldier, but I can tell you that I am a survivor, too”, another victim of the war himself. It was probably the first time in over 60 years that he had spoken about it publicly.

In my talk this week, I introduced new audiences, staff, students, and public alike, to them, and I think in this way I kept them, my old friends now passed, alive. I know I will never stop talking about them, what they went through, but more importantly, why they opened up with their stories in the end, what they wanted the world to remember, maybe really in most cases now, to really learn and be moved to action by for the first time. “The best lecture I have ever attended”, was a comment I heard from a top school official afterwards as she warmly took my hand; I noted others in the crowd welling up as I spoke from the heart, but I managed to complete the mission, not a real easy thing to do when you are feeling it too, though maybe on a more personal loss level. I guess I feel like I am channeling a major part of what defined my old friends, a message, a connection that will live on as long as I can summon the spirit to speak of them.

As we move into a new era, it is important to have the toolbox that our survivors and soldiers testimony can help us navigate with. And, given the images now beamed to us nightly from a ‘civilized’ place not so far away, it’s important to remember not to become desensitized to the horror as it unfolds, but to become educated and commit ourselves to more than just ‘Never Again’.

Humanity turned away 75 plus years ago, but our soldiers, survivors themselves, committed themselves to humanitarian action, even outside of the mission. And I hope that lesson came forth, as I brought to the center stage my old friends, and introduced them to a new generation.

I’m off to Germany in less than 12 hours, to visit Bergen Belsen again, and then the site of the liberation of the train-for the first time-and meet with German historians, students, and witnesses. I’m lying if I state that I did not have some butterflies before my recent talk at SUNY Geneseo, my old school, and I would be lying if I said I did not have them now. But it is not about me- though by now, 21 years after the first interview, I think maybe this force is continuing to channel the cosmos through me, perhaps long overdue, and made possible by donors who share the spirit of remembrance, and the spirit of Tikkun Olam: Repairing the World.

Stay tuned.