Writing in the Forward for Yom HaShoah, scholar Michael Berenbaum discusses what Holocaust survivors have accomplished and the fate of Holocaust remembrance once they are gone:
When the last survivor is gone, the Holocaust will become about the past and recede into the past. Whether it can still retain its current status is unknown but, perhaps, not unknowable. It is clear that courses will be taught on the Holocaust and genocide. A college recently renamed its Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, calling it the Center for the Study of Human Rights. In the future, this renaming and rebranding will happen more often and with much less opposition.
Survivors transformed victims into witnesses, dehumanization into a plea to deepen our humanity.
The survivors leave the rest of us who are not survivors or descendants of survivors with an important legacy and significant responsibilities.
We were not witnesses; we have lived in the presence of witnesses. Future generations will not even be able to say that.
Read the full essay.
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