No TIme for Hyperbole

This modern art at Yad Vashem (Jerusalem's Holocaust Museum) depicts those who tried to save children but were unsuccessful.

Sometimes people compare our current or the previous president to Hitler. Sometimes we refer to 9/11 as America's Holocaust. And when we do stuff like that, we seriously minimize the horror of the real Holocaust.

Let's put this in perspective. However misguided some political efforts are, nobody's president is trying to commit genocide. Please.

And for every person killed on 9/11, five hundred Jewish children were slaughtered. That's not even counting the moms and dads, aunts and uncles, young adults...that's just the little kids.

A recent visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Museum, brought this home. Translated literally "yad vashem" means hand and name, but together the words carry the idea of a memorial. The idea is based on Isaiah 56:5, “To them I will give in My house and within My walls a memorial, And a name better than that of sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.” Six million Jews were slaughtered by Hitler and his cronies. Here those innocents are remembered by name in a growing documentary. As Karl, our guide for the week, told me, the Jewish way of avenging ourselves is this: "We write history."

I found the section dedicated to children most sobering. Hollowed out to form an underground cavern, the area gives tribute to the approximately 1.5 million Jewish children who perished during the Holocaust. Inside only memorial candles, a customary Jewish tradition to remember the dead, light its dark space. They cast their reflections infinitely in mirrors, giving the impression of millions of stars shining. In the otherwise hushed setting, the names of murdered children, their ages, and countries of origin, can be heard in the background. Read endlessly.

Want to venture a guess as to how long it takes to get through them all?

The Children's Memorial was built with the generous donation of Abe and Edita Spiegel, whose son Uziel was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of two and a half. Some stuff you never "get over."

We can't do much about what already happened. But we can fight injustice wherever we see it. And that includes refusing to maximize our own dissatisfaction with politics or sense of national injury at the expense of invalidating the suffering, deep suffering, of others.