Remember - Never forget. Never again.

Today is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's always been an important day but maybe never as urgent to really think and act like today. The basics of the Holocaust didn't start with the extermination camps, it started years before that. It started with the descriptors of "certain people being less human". And once people had accepted that way of thinking, what's to stop them from agreeing or accepting that there are things you can do to these creatures. They were not looked upon as humans, that's the key of the whole thing. You have to keep a division of "they" and "us" for it to work. And work it did. For awhile. For years. To kill all those people. All those children.

I've been to Auschwitz, in the middle of the summer. It was green and so quiet. I remember thinking "it's so hard to understand since it looked so beautiful with all the trees and grass, like nature wanted to grow and show there could be a future". Then I walked into the houses, saw the torture chambers, saw all the hair and the skin taken from the people and made into lamps and books. Not to mention the shoes and the teeth and .... it was horrific. Seeing the lists of names and numbers, seeing the numbers on the skin of all the people. Understanding the organisation that it took before computers were around, and if it worked then - what possibilities now.

Seeing all the propaganda from the 1930ies, before the camps, making the arguments on blaming people and making it acceptable to beat them up without repercussions. The movies, the movie posters and everywhere you looked reinforcement of the picture of these dirty bad things (not people, "they" were lesser). To ban papers and philosophical discussions. There is nothing to debate, this is truth and this is what "we" want. To make it illegal to listen to any type of music or intellectual debate, and to put it under censorship from the state. Making lists of people who should be watched and controlled. And then making the "internment camps" to keep them in, presumingly to keep "our people safe". And once you have people in a camp, why stop there? And then now to remember that there are talks about this again, now. To add people to lists and then stop them from entering, stop saving children from the atrocities of adults and states...

If ever there was a time to remember the history and how that happened, it's now.

Surely, we have learned that making lists of undesirable people will lead towards the place where we put children in camps and tattoo numbers on their arms (or RFID chips under their skin to track)? That has been what I grew up learning. Listening to the Holocaust survivors coming to my school, showing me their numbers, telling their stories about their families who didn't make it. Telling about how they made it, about the brave men and women who fought back, how the human spirit can endure and keep faith in humans, even when something as atrocious happens as this. Telling me and my school friends so we as young teens would be on the lookout for the propaganda and be aware that this cannot happen again. That we had a responsibility to not be complicit and help the dark forces if (when) they reared their heads.

It might seem idealistic, but what else is there to do today but to affirm once again that I for one will not be a helper and complicit in these things. It will be hard, and it will be scary, but there is no alternative. All humans are worthy. There can't be a "we and them", it has to be "us humans". And there is no time to sit silently on the side lines but for action. This cannot happen again. We owe it to the dead and their relatives. And also to ourselves. We are, as humans, better than this.