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The Mortal Threat of Millennial Ignorance of the Holocaust
My daughter — a millennial, born in 1995 — was named for my grandmother, my father’s mother, who came to the US as a child, with her parents, from Uman, in Ukraine.
What my daughter’s cohort does not know or does not accept or does not understand, regarding the Holocaust, appalls, enrages, and terrifies me.
This is not about “education” or “history” or “morality” or any other abstraction.
This is deeply personal.
Some 130 miles away from Uman, in Kyiv, there was a ravine — since filled in — called Babi Yar.
During the Second World War, over a 36-hour period, German occupiers, along with local collaborators, shot some 35,000 Jews, mostly women, children, the elderly and the ill — something between dozens and hundreds of them my ancestors — and threw them into that ravine, layering it with their corpses.
The “trauma” “suffered,” by German soldiers, in mass executions of that sort, is part of what led the Nazis to first develop special vans in which the deadly carbon monoxide exhaust was piped into the “passenger compartments” and then — in an endless…