Denying the Holocaust

Whenever a revisionist historian attempts to deny or minimize the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime against Jews, he is rightly derided and humiliated by the scholarly community and the Jewish community.

However, as we remember the end of World War II this month, I can't help noticing that the Holocaust is being minimized by Jews and the "rememberance industry" as much as by non-Jews. As a third-generation survivor, I've grown up with an active (though not morbid) interest in Europe's Darkest Age. I knew from a child that 14,000,000 people, including 6,000,000 Jews, were killed by the Nazi death-dealers. I knew that the experience of the Jews was unique: Hitler was attempting their extermination in a way that perhaps only the campaign against the Roma can compare to. However, a growing trend in the media that I read is to remember only the 6,000,000 under the "Holocaust" blanket. The latest transgressors are the new Berlin Holocaust Memorial and Nick Kristof, writing on an unrelated topic. He says that the 20 million who have died of AIDS are more than three times as many as those killed by the Holocaust. Clearly, his Holocaust excludes 8,000,000 goyim who paid the ultimate penalty for being communist, Roma, homosexual, mentally retarded, evangelical, nationalist, or just unpopular with the Germans.

Kristof and others would no doubt agree quickly that the deaths of the 8,000,000 were also terrible. However, the designation "Holocaust" is special. It enshrines those it encompasses in a category more mournful than the millions who died of bombing and disease and the millions of soldiers who died in the line of duty. The purposefulness of the Nazi killing machine gives their deaths a more pointed meaning. They were not collateral: they were the target. To exclude gentiles from the "Holocaust" designation is to cheapen and minimize the designation. A solely-Jewish Holocaust becomes less accurate, less universal, and less poignant.

As a third-generation survivor, I want the world never to forget my Jewish ancestors nor the gentiles who were killed alongside them.