Holocaust remembrance

The recording and the inescapable task of judging great wrongs in the past presents historians with their most difficult assignment. For those who have either lived through such injustice or been in some way responsible for it the impositions of memory are painful and inescapable. Memory shapes the future, and the recollections of past suffering haunt and may overwhelm future generations. In 1938 the National Socialist Party in Germany began the final preparations for the systematic genocide of the Jews throughout Europe. For the Jews, whose national loyalties had long exceeded any ties of…