On the North Shore of Long Island, New York, is a museum well worth a visit. The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center in Glen Cove offers seven galleries of photos, documents, videos and displays, as well as a library and guest speakers, chronicling the lead up to and horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.
The material is presented so visitors can read, view and absorb the history of European Jews, from persecution and pogroms prior to World War I through the rise of fascism in Germany and the extermination of 6 million Jewish men, women and children, and its aftermath.
Displays show the hunger and desperation in Germany, the promises in fascist propaganda posters of “Jobs and Bread.” One important omission is no mention of the refusal of the Stalinist Communist Party and Social Democrats to unite to lead a fight against Hitler’s rise.
The imperialist leaders’ complicity is made evident — the Evian Conference in 1938 called by Roosevelt where 32 government representatives met, with no discussion of taking in Jewish refugees from fascism; capitalist governments blocking the truth from the media; how Washington turned away the St. Louis, a ship filled with fleeing Jews; how liberating U.S. GIs had never been told what to expect in the concentration camps; and the cruel conditions survivors of the Holocaust faced confined in displaced persons camps after the war.
There is also a sense of hope and humanity in examples of solidarity and resistance — a gypsy family who hid a Jew, photographed before their execution. A Muslim family likewise. Many incredible acts of protest and defiance.
Militant readers will come away better equipped to tell the facts about this chapter in the imperialist epoch.
Elizabeth Lariscy
New York, New York