The study of the Holocaust at the Memorial Library Summer Seminar on Holocaust Education is not primarily a study of history, though history is critical to understanding the Holocaust. Instead, the work is primarily about coming to understand lessons of the Holocaust as teachers. Because we are committed to bringing these lessons back to our classrooms, we are working to understand just what the Holocaust was, and also how it remains to this day a world event that should inform and guide our actions regarding hatred in all of its minor and major forms. After all, sixty years after the Holocaust ended, state-sanctioned genocide continues.
On Tuesday night we met two young men who survived the genocide in Rwanda back in the mid 1990’s. The men were here as guests and participants in an exchange program with Satellite Academy High School in Manhattan. Teachers at Satellite dedicated to Holocaust and genocide education arranged the exchange to take students from the United States to Rwanda for a two-week exchange experience, and then to bring these two young men here for two weeks to experience American culture, to speak to groups like ours, and to raise awareness and resources for programs like the exchange established at Satellite Academy High School. More information about it, and the story of the exchange can be found at www.kulebaexchange.org. It is worth noting that The Kuleba Exchange Program was the result of perhaps the most powerful force in the world: motivated teachers who have a vision and won’t take no for an answer.
Many of you are familiar with the story of Rwanda, and many probably know about it, but perhaps not the specifics. I would encourage you to read for yourself about the events and hostilities that led up to genocide in that country that killed just over a million people in a little over three months, and also the pernicious effects of colonialism in many African countries, including Rwanda. From there I would ask you to read about the Darfur region of Sudan, where 2.5 million Sudanese Muslims have fled their homes under the threat of death at the hands of fellow Sudanese Muslims who have been armed for killing by their very own government. These 2.5 million men, women, and children remain in danger of violent death at the hands of their countrymen, or the chance of a slower death due to starvation, dehydration, or disease in refugee camps full beyond capacity and growing every day. They live in the modern day version of a concentration camp.
Darfur/Sudan. Rwanda. Nazi Germany. State-sanctioned violence. The parallels are shocking, both for the patterns leaders follow to bring genocide to a government system and murder to a people, and for the fact that so much of the world stood by and permitted it to happen through ignorance, inaction, and/or fear, both in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, and continues to do so today.
Genocides start with efforts to isolate and demonize the victim group: it’s a process we are referring to as “othering” the victimized group as we discuss it in the seminar. Othering makes the victimized group something strange, foreign, different, alien, misunderstood; this process breeds ignorance; and isn’t ignorance where fear comes from; and isn’t fear the soil that the roots of hatred need to take hold?
The most important thing I can learn and share with you about my experience in this Summer Seminar on Holocaust Education is that I must prevent “othering” in my spheres of influence. As a father in my family. As a teacher in my classroom and the halls outside my door. As a citizen when I can add my voice to the chorus against bigotry, or even be that first or only voice that speaks when others haven’t, or can’t, or won’t.
There are somewhere around 3 million public school teachers in America, and many, many thousands more in private and parochial schools. If we are the first line of defense in this country, our voices against “othering” would be powerful, and the citizens we build in our classrooms would change the world. Think about that.
In the meantime I learned that on the night before the two young men from Rwanda with whom we spent an afternoon were to attend a farewell dinner, a fundraiser for the Kuleba Exchange Program, and then were to return to their country, their plans changed. Before the dinner they went for a final run along the streets of New York City, something they had been doing every evening since coming to this country. They never returned. Investigations by police and program officials have turned up information that points to Canada, where the two young men have fled and will almost certainly ask for political asylum so they do not have to return to the lives that wait for them back home in Rwanda. Get real: Holocaust education is not about information in history books—it is about life and death.
Their hosts here in America are very upset, of course, because of the jeopardy to the Kuleba Exchange Program and the repercussions to allies back in Rwanda, and also because they had no idea this is what these two young men would do, either as a planned escape or a spur of the moment event. This was not how this exchange was supposed to end.
It would be a real loss if that program were punished in some way, directly or de facto, but nobody who met the two Rwandans, who heard their story, or who understands the conditions in Rwanda for the past two decades can pretend that what they did was wrong. So many people, including the Jews of post-Holocaust Europe, looked for sanctuary in a new world when the old world was still full of danger.
The old world is still full of danger. The creation of a new world is still underway. We have to help create that world.
