Never Again?

I’m writing this column on a plane en route to Kraków, where I’ve been invited by Education International, the world’s largest global organization of educators, representing more than thirty million teachers worldwide. I’ll be speaking about how to pass on the memory of the Holocaust to younger generations—or about Holocaustology, as some dissenters sarcastically call it—one day after world leaders once again laid wreaths near Auschwitz, bowed in remembrance of the victims, and repeated the words “never again.”

Like most of you, I grew up in a country that no longer exists—a country Slovenia left just in time, before what was left of it exploded in a bloody outburst of blind nationalism and interethnic hatred. In the years since Srebrenica, the ceremonial repetition of “never again” rings even more hollow and unconvincing.

Like many of you, I went to school at a time when the narrative of World War II events was heavily influenced by the ruling ideology. That ideological indoctrination irritated me, as it did many others, but it never clouded my understanding of who was the victim and who the perpetrator, or my moral stance toward the crimes committed just twenty-some years before I was born—whether in the name of race, nation, or the treacherous opportunism of Nazi collaborators.

Part of that understanding came from personal family experience: my grandparents were deported from Nazi-annexed Styria to Bosnia. My grandmother, still bleeding from childbirth, lay on the floor of a cattle wagon with her newborn daughter, whom she had been forced to leave behind with neighbours—because the baby had just been born and her name had not yet made it onto the deportation list. These were bureaucrats of fanatical precision. They were tidy, organized, and ruthlessly efficient. They built excellent highways—the best in the world, in fact. No one built highways like they did. My grandmother and grandfather never saw their baby girl again.

There is nothing unusual about this story. Millions were murdered. Many others, like my aunt, died as collateral victims of Nazi crimes. But this family history helped me retain empathy—and avoid the comforting lie that such horrors happened only to other people, and only could happen to other people.

I remember, as a teenager in the formative years when a sense of self and worldview begin to solidify, seeing a photograph many of you likely know. It was taken in 1942 near the Ukrainian city of Ivanhorod, during the Holocaust by bullets, when SS Einsatzgruppen and their local collaborators murdered nearly 1.5 million Jews in the occupied Soviet territories.

In the photo, a desperate mother clutches her child, shielding them from the terror around them—from the inevitability of death. A man in uniform—killer, not soldier—stands with his rifle angled at 90 degrees, legs slightly spread for better aim as he prepares to kill a woman and her child. The mother cannot save her child. She dies before the bullet even strikes. The man radiates protocol, training, discipline.

The Holocaust was not carried out by a random gang of homicidal maniacs. It was a crime ordered by politicians, prepared by bureaucrats, and carried out by men in uniform—enabled by ordinary people. People without empathy, or without the courage to resist the evil surrounding them.

Auschwitz didn’t fall from the sky, as Holocaust survivor Marian Turski reminded world leaders at the Monday ceremony. The Holocaust didn’t begin when the Einsatzgruppen began raiding Jewish communities in Ukraine. This darkest stain on humanity’s collective memory—one that some in Slovenia now dismiss or question with no consequence—didn’t begin with the first trains to Auschwitz, or when Zyklon B was piped into fake showers, or when the crematoriums were fired up.

The Holocaust, in which six million people were murdered, began long before that—the moment politicians discovered the political utility of peddling hatred. When the legal and bureaucratic dehumanization of future victims began. When ordinary people were trained, like hunting dogs, to become used to blood. When they lost the capacity for compassion, solidarity, and basic humanity. When indifference prevailed. When people were ready to shrug at atrocity and look the other way.

Never again, you say? Because today we live in a world governed by empathy? One where antisemitism and racism have been vanquished? A world where we are not indifferent to those in distress—people dying before our eyes? Where the brave prevail—those willing to stand up to political merchants of hate? Because our politics consistently and resolutely reject intolerance and call for solidarity and humanism? Because we live in a society where there are no scapegoats for all our misfortunes? Where newspapers don’t compare people to parasites? A world where faith and culture are not worn like uniforms or wielded like clubs against those who are different? A world without paramilitary patrols lurking in the woods and on national stages? A world where blind, unbridled nationalism isn’t once again growing stronger?

Tears over yesterday’s crimes are meaningless if they are accompanied by indifference to today’s racism and exclusion, Marian Turski told the politicians gathered at Auschwitz. It would be nice if they took his words to heart. Our own president was there, too.

But laying a wreath once a year, lighting candles, and uttering a few hollow, worn-out phrases is not enough to protect us from plunging once again into the abyss of total inhumanity. What matters is what politicians—and all of us—do during the 364 days before and after. Every day. At every outburst of hate and intolerance. At every attack on human dignity. At every sign that, as a society, we are once again losing empathy, humanity, solidarity. At every sign that we are once again being conditioned, slowly, like hounds, to accept blood. That we might be ready, when the second act comes, to look away. Or even take part.

I don’t know—and I can’t say for certain—that history will repeat itself. I damn well hope it won’t. But I am absolutely sure of one thing: There is no guarantee that it can’t.

Especially if we remain this indifferent to the hatred that surrounds us.

The least we can do is to add a question mark to that tired phrase “never again.”

Let’s remember the words of Primo Levi, the Italian-Jewish writer who survived the horrors of Auschwitz: “It happened. Therefore, it can happen again.”