A Survivor Wonders if the World Has Grasped the Meaning of the Holocaust
And this day, nearly 70 years after then-18-year-old Anna Brunn and her mother were freed after losing her father and grandmother to the gas chambers, Ornstein wasn’t yet sold on memorials. They seem, she said, to imply punctuation, the end of something, as though everything possible has been learned.
“We like to think: ‘This is it! Now we’ll know better,’ ” she said as she came out of the cold and descended into the subterranean National September 11 Memorial Museum. But despite being what she calls “the most researched horror story in the world,” Ornstein said the Holocaust “was just the beginning of the century of genocide. Armenians, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda… . Now some Muslims say ‘Give me respect and maybe I’ll stop killing you.’ I only know we did not learn from the Holocaust that we should stop killing, because we did not.”
Ornstein, who lives outside Boston, had taken a taxi with a friend on a frigid morning to Ground Zero for the first time, to learn more about how a modern-day horror is memorialized.
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