Remembering the Holocaust should unite, not divide
June 15, 2009
File this under “things that should not be.” Brooklynites are arguing over who has the right to be memorialized at a new Holocaust Memorial of stones.
A plan to memorialize gay male victims of Nazism amid a collection of memorial stones for Holocaust victims in a quiet half-acre patch of Brooklyn has provoked an outcry.
New York State Assembly Member Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat whose many Orthodox constituents include numerous Holocaust survivors, has decried the planned addition as a distortion of the Holocaust’s meaning with regard to Jews.
“It’s easy to say, let’s include everybody, let’s be universal, diversity is great,” he said. But he added, “It just isn’t fair. It diminishes and really dilutes what the Holocaust is.”
Wait, it’s easy to say ‘Let’s include everybody, let’s be universal, diversity is great’? With all due respect, Mr. Hikind, you’re completely off base. The singular goal of the Holocaust was not only to annihilate the Jewish people, but rather all people who were deemed “unworthy” of the so-called perfect race. It was eugenics at its most insane. The point of the Holocaust was to eliminate diversity, in all its forms. Make no mistake, I am more than aware of the ill-will bestowed upon the Jewish people, and I am well aware of how Hitler chose to point the finger of blame at the Jewish community.
But the only one diluting what the Holocaust really is, Mr. Hikind, is you, and I speak this right here, right now, as both a gay man and a Jewish one. The Holocaust had many victims of not only diverse backgrounds, but multiply diverse backgrounds. Take a moment and read a little bit about the history of gays in the Holocaust and the silence that ensued for so long after the war ended. After the war ended and the world tried to move on, homosexuality remained illegal throughout Germany, and Paragraph 175 (the law on the books criminalizing homosexuality) remained in effect until 1968. A formal apology was not issued to the gay community by the German government until 2002.
The experience of gay people in the Holocaust has been largely ignored by history, which is all the more reason it needs to be memorialized as much as possible, even and especially alongside tributes to the many victims of the Holocaust. Our Holocaust memorials need to speak to everything the Holocaust stood for: we need to unite and embrace our diversity, our shared experiences, and most of all, we need to remember the atrocities in all their forms so that they may never, ever happen again.
(Please note that there is considerably more to the article I linked and quoted, and reading it in its entirety is definitely worthwhile. I chose to respond only to a very small aspect of the article, so click here to continue reading.)
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