The Resilience of Survival and Reconciliation for the Future: I was incredibly moved by todays DAAD/Classrooms without Borders visit to the Dachu Memorial. I was at first struck like any human being by the raw of emotion thinking of the lives senselessly lost there. But I was impressed with the transparency no longer was history something you read about in a book the gas chambers were there for everybody to see. If we’re going to lessons from this horrible period of time and apply it to today this is the way to do it.
Yesterday, one of my fellow participants cleverly proposed we all take a selfie together to mark our first day on this tour so that we feel the interconnectivity of this experience. Today at Dachu I felt that once again when we all lit candles at the Jewish memorial and prayed together even though I’m not a particularly religious person it all helped us find common purpose in why we were together to honor the victims and survivors.
Reconciliation has been a major topic since I have arrived in Germany in seeing how modern Germany copes with its past and how honest transparent they are about it. It was mentioned by our tour guide it’s required as part of the German education system to visit such memorials. Similarly two transformational figures in German post war history were mentioned, Fritz Bauer, himself a survivor who served as the Attorney General of West Germany and made at the time controversial decision to prosecute former Nazi officials for their conduct during the war through German justice system, the first of its kind for a country to do to its own people. A courageous step the set the template for Germany in the 1950’s to confront its history. In his final book former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote a profile of 6 world leaders he had interacted with over his long career. The first was one was Konrad Adenauer the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic and how he made it acceptable that Germany had lost the war as opposed to the post WWI era that triggered nationalist fervor that gave rise to Hitler. But Adenauer took a step further that not only had Germany lost but he set the template the country could move and be force for good in world when it came to democracy and human rights.
Lastly, on a personal note I thought all day about my Grandfather Felix Lasky. A survivor out of Buchenwald some 200 miles away from here he experienced the very worst of the holocaust losing his entire family, including a wife and two children. He went on after the war to meet my Grandmother and have 3 children including my mom and two uncles. He spent the rest of his life advocating for his fellow victims as Secretary of the Jewish Nazi victims of America and for social justice values he instilled in me to make sure what I witnessed in history today never happens again.
