Trivializing the Holocaust is an outrageous affront to humanity
I’ve said for years now that Holocaust education should be mandated for all high school students and find it mystifying that such isn’t the case in Massachusetts. (A bill has been pending in the Massachusetts Legislature for a while, and has to this point gone nowhere.)
But it’s not just the younger generations who have to get educated about the Nazi horrors against Jews and other non-White, non-German people before and during World War II: Constant remarks and actions by adults and companies show the urgency of Holocaust education.
Two particularly recent egregious examples include Republican Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest comments in which she compared the Nazi’s persecution and murder of 6 million Jews, which included forcing the Jewish people to wear Stars of David before they were shipped off to the gas chambers, to people either urged or mandated to wear masks during the coronavirus pandemic, and-or being asked for their COVID-19 vaccination status.
Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, the Washington Post reported that, following Greene's outrageous comments, a Nashville, Tenn., hat store, HatWRKS, announced on its social media that it was selling yellow patches similar to the Star of David with the words “NOT VACCINATED.”
You will recall last year that the congresswoman, who was rebuked by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for her latest comments, last year also was criticized by fellow Republicans for embracing crazy conspiracy theories that blamed last year’s California forest fires on “Jewish lasers.”
You can’t make such stuff up!
As someone who is named after a Holocaust victim, I’ve always maintained that ignorance is the surest way that another Holocaust could happen --- all it takes is a tyrant to poison the public against a particular minority by saying falsehoods enough times until people believe it.
That sadly is now in danger of happening in this country as an alarmingly number of people are trivializing the horrors of the Holocaust, just as the number of survivors --- many well into their 90s --- are dying off, as are the people who liberated them from the concentration camps: the United States servicemen and women who fought the Axis powers in World War II.
It's in that context that I offer this column, which I originally wrote in August of 2020 for Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, R.I., on a project near and dear to my heart: the Holocaust Stamps Project.
Thanks to the determination of the students, teachers and staff at the Foxboro Regional Charter School in Foxboro, MA, 11 million stamps were collected in memory of the 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews who were executed by the Nazis.
Since the school launched the project more than a decade ago, I’ve written numerous stories and columns on the Holocaust Stamps Project for The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA, where I worked full time for nearly 30 years until retiring in 2017, and then as a free-lancer for both The Sun Chronicle and Jewish Rhode Island.
This project means a lot to me, because it shows what a powerful antidote to bigotry and hatred spread through lies and ignorance that education can be.
This column on the status of the project --- along with excerpts from letters submitted by people who donated stamps to the project who shared stories of relatives who were Holocaust victims --- is must reading for anyone who doubts that the Holocaust ever happened --- or who would dare trivialize that horrific chapter in Jewish and human history.
THIS COLUMN ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE AUGUST 2020 EDITION OF JEWISH RHODE ISLAND OF PROVIDENCE, RI:
“My Lord
“I pray that these never end,
“The sand and the sea,
“The rush of the waters,
“The light of the heavens,
“The prayer of the heart.”
--- “A Walk to Caesarea” (also known as “Eli, Eli”), written by Hannah Szenes, who was killed in 1944 after refusing to give up details about her mission to rescue Hungarian Jews from deportation to Auschwitz.
The Holocaust Stamps Project, undertaken by the students at the
Foxboro Regional Charter School, has always represented the embodiment of the
role of education in keeping history alive. That’s become even more important
as the debate --- spawned by the Black Lives Matter protests across the country
---over whether to take down statues and memorials of historical figures that
have been deemed uncomfortable or offensive by some heats up.
In that context, the Holocaust Stamps project’s ability to promote understanding
of how hatred and anti-Semitism led to the state-sanctioned genocide of a particular
religious, cultural and ethnic group in 1930s and 40s Europe has a vital role
to play in ensuring that the Holocaust’s atrocities are never forgotten. That’s
especially true as aging Holocaust victims continue to die each day, which has increasingly
made the job of preserving the Holocaust’s memories the responsibility of the
victims’ children and grandchildren.
A little background
The Holocaust Stamps Project, for those unfamiliar with it, was the brainchild
of Charlotte Sheer, who taught at the Foxboro school before retiring. Sheer,
now 69 and living in Plymouth, started the project in 2009 when her fifth-grade
class began collecting stamps after reading the best-selling children’s book
“Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry. That book tells the story of a Danish girl
helping to smuggle Jewish families out of German-occupied Denmark in World War
II.
The project soon took off, and between 2009 and 2017, it reached heights
unimagined in its early days. Sheer and her fellow teacher at the Foxboro
school, Jamie Droste, who took over the project’s day-to-day duties after Sheer
retired, soon were inundated with stamp donations. Stamps poured into the
school from across the globe, and the goal of collecting 11 million stamps,
once considered daunting, was finally reached before Yom Kippur in 2017.
Eleven million stamps were chosen as a goal for the project, Sheer explained, to
represent the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust as well as the 5
million people from 21 European countries who were slaughtered as part of the
Nazis’ Final Solution. The 11 million figure includes the 1.5 million children
who were Holocaust victims. The project also produced 18 collages made from the
stamps, each depicting moments and people from the Holocaust.
Moving forward
I last wrote about the project in the fall of 2019 to report that the project
had found a new home at the American Philatelic Society’s center in Bellefonte,
Pa. Since that article appeared, all 11 million stamps and the collages have
been transported to the American Philatelic Society’s Pennsylvania center, and
the exhibit has been planned and finalized.
Those efforts were discussed in an article published in the April edition of
The American Philatelist by Susan Mills, who reported that the exhibit at the
center will include additional components. Mills wrote that a committee at the
center developed a second goal of providing “irrefutable postal history” of the
Holocaust by reaching out “to prominent Holocaust-era philatelists, including
Justin Gordon, Keith Stupell and Ken Lawrence.”
Through those efforts, Mills wrote, the center has enhanced the original
Holocaust Stamps Project with a postal history exhibit, which will complement
the project’s goals of “remembrance, recognition and a present-day pledge to
combat intolerance.”
The exhibit in Pennsylvania was supposed to have opened in June, but its
opening has been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. When it does open, the
exhibit promises to be particularly powerful and relevant given the present-day
discussions about the deep racial and ethnic divisions that persist in the
United States.
The project’s role in educating the public is especially critical given the
rise on the Internet and social media of Holocaust deniers, along with the
worldwide resurgence in anti-Semitic incidents and hate crimes.
The project, for example, is an excellent way to educate people about how and why
the raw hatred that fueled the Holocaust can be destructive to society. The
project also can demonstrate why Holocaust museums and memorials are important
teaching tools, and why the Nazis’ death camps --- including Dachau in Germany,
Auschwitz in Poland and Bergen-Belsen in Germany --- must never be closed or
torn down.
The Holocaust Stamps Project was started to help youngsters become aware of the
atrocities committed by the Nazis, and in its new home, the project will do the
same thing for a much broader audience.
But don’t take my word for it; read the excerpts from just three of the many
letters, which accompany this column, that were sent to the school by the stamp
donors. Those letters provide personal stories about some of the Holocaust’s victims,
and if those don’t reduce you to tears, nothing will.
PERSONAL REMEMBRANCES OF THE HOLOCAUST ….
The following are excerpts from three of the letters
received by Foxboro Regional Charter School students by people who donated
stamps to the project. To see more letters, and to find out more about the Holocaust
Stamps Project, go to https://stamps.org/news/c/news/cat/local/post/remembrance-connection-witness-the-making-of-a-holocaust-exhibit.
“My
great aunt, Mindl Kotel, was killed by the Nazis in front of her home, along
with her husband and three children ages 11, 8 and 5. I saved five of the
prettiest stamps and am putting them with a page showing the truncated family
tree. Thank you for remembering Mindl, Pinya, Vladimir, Abram and Bronya, along
(with) the other 11 million killed in the Holocaust.”
S. Radbil
“Some (stamps) are from my piano teacher ... [Her
name] was Gabriella Kottler and I will never forget the number burned on her
arm from when she was in the camps. One Christmas, she came to our house for
dinner with her husband and ended up telling us her story. I vividly remember
her telling us how they wanted to break her as she was a strong woman. Gabriella
persevered, even when they took her shoes and made her stand in line in the
snow. There was not a sound around the dinner table for over an hour.”
J. Flynn
“I am sending you 100 Australian stamps, in memory of my maternal grandparents,
Dolec and Jozefa Lurie. Both were survivors of concentration camps, and along
with Dolec’s brother, were the only members of both families combined to live
through the Holocaust. They were newlyweds before the war, and were reunited
afterwards in a displaced person’s camp in Trani, Italy. They chose to emigrate
to Australia, and lived there the rest of their lives.”
M. Cole
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