Se non ora, quando?

Seventy years ago today, the Red Army—no strangers to nightmares—came upon a hollowed-out shell of a compound that became the one-word representation of the worst that humans could do to one another. And so today, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a conglomeration of factories—both for manufacturing and for death, as distinguished from other camps like Majdanek or Sobibor or Treblinka, which were devoted to extermination pure and simple. Great German industrial powerhouses, like the chemical monolith I.G. Farben and arms giant Krupp, consumed hundreds of thousands of prisoners as slave labor in their factories. Those who could no longer work went to the gas chambers, where one of Farben’s most famous products, Zyklon B (developed for pest control), snuffed out their lives.

Oh, well—you know all that, don’t you?

And yet, you don’t, or you forget, or you become impatient with remembering, because it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and even unpleasant to think about it. And there’s always someone ready to shout about how one atrocity is offset by another because it preceded it, or went on longer, or involved one ethnic or religious group or another.

But the events of recent weeks (and years and decades) have made it all too clear that those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Anti-Semitism, intolerance and dogmatism are on the rise. And now that pretty much anyone has access to assault rifles, RPG launchers, bio-weapons and worse, we do well to haul ourselves out of our daily stroll through the trees and take a good, hard look at the bloody forest.

We have been provided with irrefutable proof on an unimaginably massive scale, within living memory, that those who begin by burning books have no qualms whatsoever about burning people. If we can’t learn that lesson, I just despair.