Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 21, 1993                   TAG: 9304210330
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HOLOCAUST

The names evoke almost unimaginable evil for those familiar with the place's historical association. Yet, according to a survey released this week by the American Jewish Committee, a majority of American high-school students and more than a third of adults do not know these were concentration camps, places where Nazis efficiently exercised the Final Solution.

This is troubling, particularly now, because memory soon will pass into history. The number of survivors and witnesses is dwindling.

This week the world commemorates the loss of 6 million Jews, murdered - along with Gypsies, the handicapped, intellectuals, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals - not so long ago, by one of the world's most civilized nations. On Sunday, on their annual Day of Remembrance, Yom Hashoah, Jews reopened history's wounds.

Several events of remembrance are going on this week in Roanoke as elsewhere. This month also marks the 50th anniversary of the heroic, doomed uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.

Next week, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is to open on the Tidal Basin in Washington D.C. Among its exhibits are artifacts effecting, in Leon Wieseltier's words, "a rape of the eye."

Why this preoccupation with the past? A better question is: How can it be that 22 percent of Americans responding to a Roper survey say they believe it's possible the Holocaust never happened? Twenty-two percent. An obscene indicator of denial.

In Germany, a school of revisionist historians tries in effect to limit guilt for the Holocaust to a murderous, aberrational regime. As if normal, everyday people in Germany and millions of bystanders the world over shared no blame.

One of the reasons sometimes suggested for why so many, including Jews, remained passive in the face of this horror, is that genocide is fundamentally incredible. Who could believe human beings were doing what the Nazis were accused of doing?

Yisroel Gutman, in his book "The Jews of Warsaw," recalls that the truth "simply could not be fully apprehended. Logic, emotion and the deep-seated convictions about man's basic humanity all dictated that what was going on at Treblinka was simply not possible."

The past must be kept close to remind us that it was and is possible.

Greeting visitors to the new museum in Washington is a quotation from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who visited the liberated death camps. "The things I saw beggar description. . . . I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda."

Incredible as it may seem, growing numbers of people assert that the Holocaust never happened. They have time on their side, and begin with a natural constituency of 22 percent of Americans who neglect the lessons of history and the dangers of ignorance.