today the world comes together to remember the horrors of the Holocaust. We honor the 6 million Jews and 5 million others--Roma, Afro-Germans, gay men and women, people with disabilities and more--whom the Nazis brutally murdered. And we stand in awe and celebration of those brave souls who managed to survive. It is difficult to comprehend the terror that took place in Europe between 1939 and 1945, but we carry on an obligation to those who perished and those who survived to prevent further genocide and mass atrocities. It is critical that we understand what happened to them so we can prevent it from ever happening again. One of the most important things to understand about the Holocaust is that while a limited group of particularly evil monsters orchestrated it, they could not have succeeded without the active or tacit support of millions of average people. Men and women agreed to turn over their neighbors, patrol the ghettos, drive the cattle cars, guard the death camps, and line people up to shoot them down. Men and women decided to avert their gaze and do nothing to stop the atrocities. I don't believe that all those people were born villains. I think they were taught by their communities to adopt a level of anti-Semitism and prejudice that likely would have been recognizable to many of us today and that the Nazi propaganda masters exploited those feelings. That terrifies me because it means that the Holocaust was not an anomaly.…
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