For today’s young, the holocaust is ancient history – which poses huge danger
The first news about the Nazi annihilation camps began to spread in the crucial year of 1942. They were vague pieces of information, yet in agreement with each other: they delineated a massacre of such vast proportions, of such extreme cruelty and such intricate motivation that the public was inclined to reject them because of their very enormity. It is significant that the culprits themselves foresaw this rejection well in advance: many survivors (among others, Simon Weisenthal in the last pages of The Murderers Are Among Us) remember that the SS militiamen enjoyed cynically admonishing the prisoners: ‘However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none