As I was scrolling through my Facebook News Feed last night, I came upon a small story tucked neatly away on CNN’s page. It was not large, nor had it garnered the media attention that the other, more pop culture-oriented stories had, but I found it infinitely more important.
It was the story of a 110-year-old woman named Alice Herz-Sommer, who passed away in her small country home in Prague. Herz-Sommer was the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, whose musical skills saved her from the gas chambers at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In fact, her story is featured in the Oscar-winning short film The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life.
You may be curious as to why I would be so fascinated by Herz-Sommer’s death, besides the tragic nature of the event. After all, the genocide that took place happened over 70 years ago.
The key word here is genocide.
You may be thinking I’m writing simply to rant about the problems that have been presented in the last decade, such as ever-increasing view of Holocaust survivors as victims instead of survivors. While this would make for a persuasive (and entertaining) article, my argument goes in the opposite direction: I feel that there needs to be more of an emphasis placed upon the horrors that were suffered by those who endured the Holocaust, particularly in media.
If we were to share more survivor stories, like that of Herz-Sommer, and apply their experiences to our world today, we would not only gain a greater awareness of the tenacity of the human spirit, but we would be able to be more proactive in stopping modern genocides and ethnic cleansing. Perhaps I am slightly biased, as my own relatives were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camps. I feel, though, that this only strengthens my argument. After all, in the words of George Santayana, “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.”