This week, Hillel, a Jewish student group, is hosting several events for Holocaust Remembrance Week. As considerate as it is for students to take time to honor the victims of any tragedy, I am a bit concerned that Hillel may not be presenting themselves how they might wish. There are quite a few chalkings around campus advertising the events with the traditional slogan of “never forget” and I’ve seen several with a side notes that say “6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.” While I have absolutely no problem with Jewish students getting together to honor the victims of the Holocaust, I was a little surprised they only mentioned Jewish victims.
It makes some sense, because, as a Jewish organization, Hillel would obviously be most concerned with remembering the Jews who died in the Holocaust. However, since most of the estimates which are considered at least partially reliable put the numbers of Jews and nonJews murdered about even, I was dismayed that, at least in Hillel’s advertisements, there wasn’t a mention of the many other nonJewish victims.
The Holocaust is one of those very sensitive topics which have deeply personal implications for many very diverse groups of people. Jews, Gypsies, Poles, mentally or physically handicapped people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, political rebels, trade unionists, Freemasons, Catholics, Protestants and many other so-called “undesirable” groups were all targeted by Nazis.
While I know that none of this information will be new to anyone involved with Hillel and while the last thing I want to do is appear condescending, I still have to ask if it is really right to separate these victims into Jews and nonJews and recognize them separately. It’s common knowledge that Jews were the single largest group affected by the Holocaust and, if they want to, the members of Hillel are more than welcome to only recognize the Jewish victims in their ads or events. But as an outsider, I would have thought that a group with such an obvious sympathetic connection to the Holocaust would have had the same sympathy for all of the victims, not merely the Jewish ones. I can’t imagine it would in any way have lessened the honor of the Jewish victims if the ads would have read, “10 million people died in the Holocaust.”
It’s apparent that the students involved in Hillel are trying to do a very good thing by preserving the memory of the Jewish Holocaust victims, but I wonder if they have really thought about how what they are doing looks to other people.
In all fairness I should admit that as a Catholic of Polish descent I am in no way unbiased, but as far as I know, the people who were suffering and dying together during the Holocaust were just that; they were together. And, I don’t really think that it’s right to separate them now.
In all likelihood, the members of Hillel will probably also remember the other nonJewish victims during their events, but that is not really relevant to my point, except that it makes it slightly more valid. If the other victims are not being mentioned at all, which I doubt, then I argue that they should be, for my previous reasons. And if they are mentioned, which I imagine is the case, then Hillel’s advertising would have been much better had it seemed less exclusive.
As a columnist, I, more than most people, know exactly what it’s like to try to do some good and have people publicly criticize you and say that you aren’t doing enough or aren’t doing things the “right” way. So I am extremely sensitive to how my opinion may come off to the members of Hillel. But honestly, my only intention is to make them consider how they are representing their events and evaluate whether or not they are making the statement they intended to make.
