Society’s Most Essential Lessons

For many years, I’ve written in this space about sports and life lessons our children can learn from them.Lessons that help kids become productive, resilient adults and are important to their development. 

But, I’m pushing sports aside, just for today. I’ve thought long and hard whether to do that, in favor of tackling something pretty far afield from our usual and decided to go ahead. But please be warned, today's post may not be for everyone. 

I just returned from an extraordinary trip to Europe. That trip made very clear to me the truly essential lessons that must be taught to our children. These are not lessons for individual development as much as they are powerful understandings and warnings that allow us to live together peacefully as a society, keep us all free to live our lives, and keep man’s most hateful instincts reined in.

I saw so much beauty, art, scenery, and historical architecture, and met many friendly, caring and helpful people in both Holland and Germany. 

I also saw, firsthand, sites that show the horrors of what can happen if man’s hateful instincts are allowed to take root and grow. 

In Amsterdam, I visited the Anne Frank secret annex, where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis for two years before being discovered and sent to concentration camps. It was a well done tour, and very sobering, of course.

In Berlin, I visited the Holocaust Memorial. 

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As a Jew, and with my mother born in Germany in 1923, my perspective is very personal. But you would need a heart of stone to not be very moved by the exhibits in the underground museum that sits beneath the actual memorial. I have been to holocaust and WWII museums both in the US and abroad, I’ve read many books and watched many documentaries. Nothing has affected me the way this museum did. 

The museum covers the chronology: Hitler’s rise to power and his suspension of the German constitution, paving the way for him to become absolute ruler; the creation of laws to systematically remove “undesirables” (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses) from society, forcing many to emigrate elsewhere and making life extremely difficult and dangerous for those who stayed; and the building of death camps to rid the world of those the Nazis blamed for their troubles and who didn’t fit with their fantasies of what the world should look like. 

It’s the same history lesson you might find in any book or documentary. Very quickly, however, the museum leaves the history lesson behind and presents a series of exhibits that are very difficult to get through. 

I walked into a room where I read diary entries of those imprisoned in the concentration camps. The words of fathers and husbands, wives and mothers, and even young teenagers, some who didn’t yet realize their fate, and others who knew their days were coming to an end. Another room contained the stories of entire families who were murdered, with their family pictures from the 1920s and 1930s on display. Yet another room contained exhibits of the death camps and other gruesome sites where hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of innocent people were murdered. That room included vivid descriptions of how humans were herded into mobile death chambers to be suffocated by carbon monoxide or packed in train box cars to be transported to the secret death camps in Poland. The German people, to their credit, pull no punches with these exhibits and clearly accept responsibility for what their ancestors did. 

To call it gut-wrenching is putting it mildly. 

There is a quote near the entrance to the museum, “It happened, therefore it can happen again. That is the core of what we have to say.” 

The way to prevent future horrors like the Holocaust is to make sure our children are taught the most important lessons: civics, democracy, decency, and respect for others and their differences. It is imperative that we teach them to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. And we must teach them world history and not sugar coat it. Not only the history of the Nazis atrocities, but of the genocides in Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia, the oppression and murder of millions in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and, as late as the 1990’s, the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

We have to teach them that our nation was created based on the principle that we have no absolute ruler, that we have laws that apply to us all, even those with great wealth and power. And teach them to challenge the powerful when they speak and act in ways that disregard those laws. Finally, we have to teach them to be brave, and speak out, even when mobs are going along with hate and violence. 

And while we’re at it, we should remind ourselves of all of these essential lessons. 

It happened, therefore it can happen again. But only if our children don’t learn essential lessons of respect and caring for each other that help us live successfully together as a society.