Guest column: The power of words

The freshmen gather out front the Museum of Tolerance at the conclusion of their tour. COURTESY OF PEYTON HUTCHISON


The Holocaust: genocide throughout Nazi-controlled Europe characterized by the merciless slaughter of multiple ethnic groups, but mostly Jews, aimed at mass extinction for the purification of the Aryan race.

As survivors, including Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, have described, it was an endless “night” whose skies grew dark with thick clouds of smoke billowing from the crematorium's chimney and rained down showers of white ash to mirror the burning's tears, whose silence spread to even the democratic corners of the world and yet was only broken by screams – of agony, of loss – surrounded by the jagged spirals of barbed wire, electric fences, and stench of smoldering flesh.

Why? Why did Hitler and his fascist regime place a target on Jews and others? Why were they deemed “unworthy of life”?

Because they were different. That is all.

Today, the Holocaust is but a memory; however, it is one society must continue to remember, one that it must pass on.

Each year at Yorba Linda High School, the Freshman Honors Language Arts classes read “Night,” a novel written by Wiesel recounting his experience within the walls of Auschwitz, one of the largest Nazi concentration camps.

For the first time in the school's history, in November, the classes' teachers were able to secure a set of tours at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Established in 1993 as the educational facility of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the museum walked the students through two main exhibits detailing the causes and happenings of the Holocaust as well as the Tolerance Center in which lessons to be gathered from the Holocaust were applied to today's world and its modern problems.

“It was just unbelievable what those people went through. … It's amazing anyone survived,” said freshman Ryan Birchfield.

As the day came to a close, the students formed pledges of their own in honor of those who were lost in the Holocaust as well as what they had learned from the past and its parallels to the present.

“I am going to try my very best to make sure nothing like that ever happens again,” said Rachel Seo, a freshman. “And if it does, I am going to speak up about it.

“So many people died, you would think it could not happen,” Seo said.

But it did. And perhaps most disturbing of all is that it could have happened anywhere in the world. After all, each and every victim of the Holocaust was an ordinary person, an ordinary person living an ordinary life. That all changed, however, because of one man and his words of hatred.

As the Nazis stripped Jews of their rights day by day, the world remained silent. When they boycotted their businesses and banished them to crowded, fenced-in ghettos, the world remained silent. As SS officers herded them like livestock into cattle cars without food, without water, without room to do anything but stand, the world remained silent. And so they entered through the gates of hells like Auschwitz-Birkenau, like Belzec and Kulmhof, while the world remained silent.

By the time the white stars of the liberation tanks rolled up to these same gates, only an estimated 1.5 million Jews made it out of that “night,” leaving a death toll of 6 million Jews and millions from other groups. From this immeasurable loss of life and of culture, from this unacceptable mistake, the world must absorb that silence has consequences.

When one sees injustice and does not speak up, one is condoning it.

As leading news devotes more time to popular culture and Hollywood's elite, who speaks up on behalf of the orphans rapidly multiplying in Darfur? And while a child or teen cries over the cruel words exchanged during the school day or on the internet, who speaks up for him or for her? It is time the citizens of the world realize what Elie Wiesel stated in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, that “what all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.”

It is time to speak up.

– Peyton Hutchison is a senior and the co-editor in chief of the newspaper at Yorba Linda High School.

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