Essays, artwork commemorate Holocaust
Adrien Regelbrugge, a seventh-grader at St. Aloysius Gonzaga Catholic School, won first place in the ninth annual Eva Lassman Memorial Writing Contest. Here is his essay:
… But Names Will Never Hurt Me?
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis initiated a war that cost the lives of 55 million people, including the genocide of 6 million Jewish men, women and children and 5 million other “undesirables” in the Holocaust. Together with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler used propaganda to promote indifference toward the suffering of neighbors, disguised the Nazis’ genocidal actions, and helped shape a climate in which ordinary people carried out or tolerated mass violence and murder. Propaganda is still used today to suit the purposes, good or bad, of those who use it.
In March 1933, Hitler declared that “the whole educational system, theater, film, literature, the press, and broadcasting would be used as means to the end of preserving the eternal values of the German people.” After the burning of tens of thousands of allegedly “un-German” books in Berlin and many other German cities, Goebbels said in May 1933 on the radio, “German men and women! The age of arrogant Jewish intellectualism is now at an end! You are doing the right thing … to consign to the flames the unclean spirit of the past…. Out of these ashes the phoenix of a new age will rise!”
“The Poisonous Mushroom,” an anti-Semitic children’s story for German youth, demonstrates how the Nazis sought to essentially brainwash their children, predisposing them against Jews from such early ages: “Yes, my child! Just as a single poisonous mushroom can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk…. The Jew is the most dangerous poisonous mushroom in existence; the Jew is the cause of misery and distress, illness and death…. The Jew is … the Devil in human form.”
In Simon Wiesenthal’s “The Sunflower,” a dying Nazi soldier wished to confess to the author his crime of involvement in the burning of hundreds of Jews locked inside a house. After the war, Wiesenthal visited this Nazi soldier’s mother: “Ah, if you only knew what a fine young fellow our son was. He was always ready to help without being asked. At school he was really a model pupil – till he joined the Hitler Youth and that completely altered him. From then on he refused to go to church.” Wiesenthal: “People like him are still being born, people who can be indoctrinated with evil. Mankind is ostensibly striving to avert catastrophes; medical progress gives us hope that one day disease can be conquered, but will we ever be able to prevent the creation of mass murderers?”
The Nazis did not simply write words and make posters that instantly created mass murderers. Instead, acts of prejudice, including the use of words or media for name calling, ridicule and jokes at the expense of others, were the basis of genocide then and remain a tolerant society’s greatest obstacle.
Unlike the 1930s and ’40s, technology today allows for the spread of words – good and bad – so much faster and to so many more people, worldwide. Online bullying (“cyber bullying”) is a major crisis from middle school through college. Using the Internet – including apps, emails, Facebook, Instagram and numerous other messaging services – people are now able to spread whatever ideas and opinions they have about any and everybody. While in the past a person would need to be published, or at least make an awful lot of copies of paper to say what he/she wanted, today anyone can say what they want, and chances are there will be someone willing to read it. Hateful, inappropriate, prejudiced and bullying messages are sent, and often go viral … and unstopped!
Cyber bullying takes bullying and exclusion of others to an entirely different level, and causes even greater exclusion and isolation of the people and groups of people being bullied and persecuted. Teenage depression and suicide rates because of bullying and exclusion continue to rise, as well as hate crimes related to racial and religious bias, sexual preference and ethnicity.
The “poisonous mushroom” is not any race, religion or group of people. What is poisonous is hatred. It is hatred and prejudice that, like the baobabs in “The Little Prince,” if not rooted out early, will grow and overwhelm the planet. From bullying in schools to the assassination of French political cartoonists for the “crime” of expressing ideas, the world suffers and we should be ashamed.
I would use words and ideas today like people who have inspired me. If change can truly begin with me to help stop the beat of the hateful drums, I would do as students at a Vermont High School just did. They launched a “positive post-it” campaign in which they created a school app to offer praise and encouragement to fellow students in response to a school app that had been used to spread offensive, harmful comments about gays, black students and others of different ethnic backgrounds. They succeeded in having the negative app removed, and changed the culture of the school.
I am also inspired by heroes such as the White Rose Society, the only group of Germans to use “positive” propaganda to inform fellow Germans of the Nazis’ crimes and to demand the Nazis’ removal. Like the White Rose Society, Anne Frank’s idealism that “people are still good at heart,” and the teachings of Martin Luther King that we are “all brothers,” I aim to stand up to hate, bullying and prejudice by taking action. I will work with my friends to use technology (Instagram, apps, etc.) and to make posters that ask for tolerance, understanding and appreciation of others. My hope would be that, to counter the mushroom of hatred, flower gardens of understanding and respect could win out. The Nazis could have been defeated if people joined together and stopped them when they were a minority. Let’s not turn the other cheek ever again, and murder indifference by using words and ideas for love, tolerance and positive action instead.