Today in the sunshine, amid the laughs and conversation of students outside the EMU, it’s difficult to hear the Holocaust Readings. The names, places of birth and places of death get lost in the swirl of active, vibrant life.
Last night at half-past midnight, as I left the EMU, that was not the case. The deep voice of a male reader ripped into the fabric of night. It seemed like an image from a dream; no one was around, and only the buildings and I were absorbing the names of Holocaust victims. It almost seemed like an image from Nazi Germany, where official-sounding proclamations ring out from a PA, breaking the moist stillness of the air. The names rang out again and again, coming slowly enough to hear, but so fast they seemed to blur together, as though there weren’t any specific individuals but just a mass of humanity.
The Holocaust victims were specific individuals, though, and they each died a very specific death. The movement of time must be what renders the readings so hyper-real to me. Enough years have passed and enough movies and TV shows have been made that hearing the names read seems like an archetypal experience — super surreal and yet devastatingly personal.
A few tears rolled down my face as I stood transfixed, listening to the continuous recitation, family member after family member. So many people that sometimes the same name is repeated three or four times. But they were each an individual, worthy of dignity and respect.
Every year when I hear the reading of the names, I realize the paramount importance of the event; we must never forget. The deaths happened in the early 1940s. Sixty years is a long time, and today’s freshmen probably have little more than a token understanding of the Holocaust. I remember that my own first visceral experience with it was reading Elie Weisel in high school in the late 1980s. It might be more poetic to say that my experience was immediate, that my grandfather escaped from, or died in a concentration camp, and that’s why I can relate to this. But I can’t because he didn’t.
My own visceral relation to the injustice of human oppression is more recent. I am gay, and I have had enough experiences with intimidation and discrimination to know the feeling of being singled out for no rational reason. Obviously I have no idea what it’s like to be enslaved or to have my entire family murdered because of race. The University, and Eugene as a whole, is generally very tolerant of my sexuality, and I never really feel the fear I occasionally experienced in New York and San Francisco. But last night, after hearing the names and thinking of the Holocaust, I looked anxiously over my shoulder at every loud, rowdy car that passed me on my way home.
That’s the importance, to me, of the Holocaust Readings and, in some small way, of David Horowitz’s slavery reparations ad. Sometimes we need emotionally gripping, visceral reminders of the evils that have been perpetrated on humanity by humanity. Because it’s not over yet, y’all.
All over the world, people are being captured, tortured, enslaved and discriminated against based on race, religion, gender and sexuality. When members of these very large segments of humanity speak out angrily about injustices and slights to their causes, some people in this community want to brand them reactionary. Some people say they are overreacting. Some people say they should find more productive ways to express their feelings.
But the kinds of injustices I’m speaking of are monstrous. These are systematic denials of expression, freedom and humanity, and they often demand very visible and very large demonstrations of outrage.
We all need to be more sensitive to the idea that everyone is not yet treated with equal respect, and the injustices we identify today are not less significant than those that have occurred in the past, even if they aren’t murders and enslavement. The injustices identified today actually have added weight, because like the reading of the names, they emotionally remind us of all that has come before and of how far we have yet to go.