Who said never forget

To testify became an obsession. They left us poems and letters, diaries and fragments of novels, some known throughout the world, others still unpublished. Judaism has always attached intense significance to remembrance; in multiple passages the Hebrew Bible even makes it an explicit religious obligation.

It begins this year on Wednesday evening. In recent decades, Holocaust commemoration, particularly in the West, became a widespread cultural phenomenon. Countless books, lectures, and documentaries have been devoted to the topic. Academia is replete with Holocaust studies programs.

On big and small screen alike, movies and miniseries on Holocaust themes have been runaway successes. Online resources for learning about the Holocaust are almost too numerous to count. And Holocaust memorials and museums have been erected in cities large and small, on every continent except Antarctica.

The history was written. Its remembrance is sustained by an ocean of scholarship, testimony, literature, and education. The last living survivors of the Holocaust are now mostly in their 80s or 90s. In a few years almost no one will be left to speak from personal experience of what it meant to be engulfed in the singular horror of the Shoah.

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He got him a shower, clothes, and, most important, papers that would get him through military checkpoints. Then he found the motorcycle. He spotted it in a garage in a village. It had a full tank of gas, so he figured it belonged to a German. I fell off, but I got back on and fell off and got back on, again and again. Rumors were rampant. The postwar grapevine was filled with information about lost people looking for other lost people.

Izzy learned that Anna Ballter, the girl who had gotten food to him in the labor camp, was still at Bergen Belsen, the concentration camp in northern Germany that had been liberated by British forces — he felt compelled to search for her.

They had only one pair of shoes and a different woman got to wear them each day. Izzy bribed the girl with the shoes. He is a gigolo, a real Casanova. They were married in As I light this Yellow Candle, I vow never to forget the stories of Izzy Arbeiter and Anna Balter; and I vow never to forget the lives of the Jewish men, women, and children who were martyred and are symbolized by this flame.

They were tortured and brutalized by human beings who acted like beasts; their lives were taken in cruelty. Like everyone, I was touched and reassured by the outpourings of grief and expressions of solidarity. The tragedy will be mourned, then trivialized, then commercialized, and then amnesia will set in. This is America , where memory comes to die.

I was wrong. For once, our forgetfulness failed us. It has become a mantra and a marketing tool for politicians and merchandise alike. I was right about that.