REMEMBRANCES A man laid flowers Tuesday during a ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the departure of the first convoys carrying Jewish people to concentration camps from the Gruenewald railway station in Berlin. (Photo: John Macdougal/ / AFP-Getty via the Wall Street Journal).
I often — often — think about how many more people might be forgetting, or not learning, about this period in world history, instead of remembering it, reading about it in books, history or biography or otherwise. The Holocaust happened: millions of souls, exterminated, for no reason at all but unmitigated, pure, base hatred.
The reminders of humanity’s darkest era are, sadly, still with us: this train station, the preserved sites of concentration camps, photographs and documents kept by museums and centers around the world. These places and people will not allow us to forget.
And we should not.