THREAD: My Jewish relatives talked about the Holocaust a lot. They warned me against standing in lines, entering rooms with no exit, and against people who would seek to blame others for a nation's suffering...
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There are many reasons people mention Hitler often, but the reason his name was on my family's lips was fear. Before the war, they never believed their neighbors and friends could send them off to die without caring or protesting.
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They never believed the people they saw in the butcher shop and the concert hall would watch their children beaten and their houses ransacked without offering aid or even a kind word.
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That kind of betrayal, seeing the viciousness and callousness that average people are capable of, scarred them forever.
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Perhaps they'd heard that human beings could be monstrous, but thought those kind of people were villains and killers, people you watch from afar, not their neighbors and coworkers and friends.
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My family talked about the Holocaust a lot because they knew, with terrifying accuracy, how quickly human beings can become monstrous. They wanted me to watch for that transition and to guard against it and to be safe.
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"It happened, therefore it can happen again," Primo Levi said. Fascism and mass murder was unthinkable in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor.
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Other nations hesitated to respond because they couldn't believe the German people would gas their own people, or torture them, or gun them down in the streets.
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It took years for others to realize that frightened, defensive people who feel they've been wronged and are desperate to blame others are dangerous. Average people can become killers.
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That's the lesson of the Holocaust, the lesson my family strove to teach me by talking about what happened. #NeverAgain
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