Editorial: Holocaust commemoration reminds us to learn from, not just read, lessons of history

There are some today who assign the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945 to the annals of ancient history, an event whose horrors are buried in a distant past no longer reflective of a civilized world.

There are some today who marvel that as recently as 75 years ago, human beings were capable of committing mass brutality in the very name of civilization.

There are even some, still today, who deny that the events of the 1930s and '40s ever occurred and claim, with all the self-righteous force of internet conspiracy madness, that the well-documented stories are a bizarre contrivance, promoted to foster some insidious plot for world domination.

And then, there is Fritzie Fritzshall. Her grim conclusion addresses them all.

"Every time I go back and walk into (Auschwitz) and walk on those roads ... I see all of us," Fritzshall, of Buffalo Grove, told our Russell Lissau for a report published Sunday, ahead of Monday's commemoration of the day Soviet troops liberated the camp near the end of World War II. "People say it was so many years ago. But it wasn't. It was my lifetime."

For 90-year-old Fritzshall, a teenage girl when she was shipped to Auschwitz with her brothers, mother and other family members, the horrors of the camp are unalterably real and vividly immediate. And stories like hers haunt the memories and family lore of hundreds of thousands of Jewish families around the world.

They are the reasons we should support memorials like the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie and honor commemorations like International Holocaust Remembrance Day. For, the sad fact, the horrifying fact, of the matter is that genocide remains very much a reality a fifth of the way into the 21st century, and, as we have seen over and again since the fall of Nazi Germany, a society all too easily can turn its emotional, righteous, indignant outrage on a minority in its midst. Darfur, Boznia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Myanmar, the former ISIS caliphate, Yemen, Syria, Xinjiang and more. The roster of sectarian atrocities reaches across the globe and is lodged in contemporary memory. And, amid it all, Jews still remain a consistent target. Studies as recent as 2018 show anti-Semitism dramatically on the increase in the United States and throughout Europe. An anti-Semitic act occurred right here in the suburbs barely a month ago.

"Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity ...," pleads a plaque at the entrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau,

To that injunction, another clause clearly also needs to be added: Let us all hear that cry of despair and heed its warning to humanity. For, however we assess the passing of three-quarters of a century, the words of Fritzie Fritzshall provide an unmistakable reminder of a responsibility that does not change with time: "In my mind, I'm still in Auschwitz. Seventy-five years feel like yesterday."