From Nazi Germany to Iran, lessons on twisted leadership - Washington Post
There, a father places his son — about 6, I’d guess — in front of the oven and poses him for a picture. As the boy holds the pose, I sneak a glance at the camera’s display screen: the boy, the oven. I don’t know if the Holocaust has been further trivialized or further memorialized. The extermination camps came later, the most famous of them being Auschwitz , where about 1 million Jews were murdered. ” That camp has become synonymous with the Holocaust itself, obscuring not only other camps (where the survival rate was nonexistent) but also the fact that most of Europe’s Jews were not killed in some industrialized, virtually robotic, fashion. They were shot close up. “When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different than us murdered other people not very... But I see the father who has come with his son to Dachau, and I don’t know what to make of him. I know he is not the murderer pictured in the displays, and I do not hold him accountable for what happened here. But I have known for some time that Snyder is right, that the Holocaust was an immense national effort, that much of the killing was done by. Source: www.washingtonpost.com
