"Global Perspectives on the Holocaust"

The annual Holocaust Studies Symposium is back on our campus next week, Oct. 19-22. Here's this year's program... and here was my notice of the excellent conference two years ago.

Organized in 1988, the Middle Tennessee State University Holocaust Studies Committee's original mission was to encourage the study of the Holocaust at Middle Tennessee State University and in the mid-South.  Since that time the committee's mission evolved to:

• disseminate greater understanding of and knowledge about the Holocaust from an inter-disciplinary and bi-gender perspective;

• serve as a bulwark against the spread of Holocaust denial and antisemitism, as well against racial, religious and ethnic hatred;

• memorialize the lives and suffering of all people persecuted during the Holocaust.  These include but are not limited to Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Hitler’s political opponents, people of African descent, Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious groups, and persons with physical or mental disabilities

• raise awareness in both the academic community and the general public that genocidal hate did not end in 1945 by disseminating information about other genocides, past and present.

liberated

The Holocaust Conference at my school is in full swing. This morning featured a panel* of survivors and liberators. How astonishing to realize that there are still people among us who carry such searing, painful, impossible first-hand memories of human brutality within themselves; how amazing to see what productive lives they've managed to build, despite those horrific traumatizing experiences; and how sobering to think that soon there will be no living witnesses left to contradict the silly/stupid "deniers."

And, how right Mrs. Rosenfeld and Rabbi Jacobs were to note the hopefulness implicit in the fact that so many of those survivors, forced to carry on after parents, siblings, and other family and friends had been so viciously mowed down, returned from the precipice of death and replenished the tree of life with new generations of children and grandchildren. That does answer the deniers, with an eloquence they probably can't understand.

Conference participant Gerhard Weinberg is right: unchecked hatred fueled the holocaust. But so did weak-willed compliance and indifference. As has been said so often: evil triumphs when "good" people fail to act. It's never enough merely to have free will, we have to want to use it.

*Frances Cutler Hahn, Nashville, TN

Ben Lesser, Las Vegas, NV

Eric Rosenfeld, Nashville, TN

Eva Rosenfeld, Nashville, TN

*Liberators Panel:

Jimmy Gentry, Franklin, TN

James Dorris, Chattanooga, TN