By: Ben Le Roy
I watched a clip from a film today called The History Boys. In this particular chapter of the film, a handful of students were discussing with two of their professors whether the Holocaust can or should be taught. Narrowing in to the exact moments of interest to me, one professor exclaims, “Why can’t we simply condemn the camps as an unprecedented horror?” A student, in response, says, “There’s no point sir, everyone will do that — ‘The camps an event unlike any other,’ ‘the evil unprecedented,’ etcetera, etcetera.” Finally, in response the professor says, “Can’t you see that even to say etcetera is monstrous? Etcetera is what the Nazi’s would have said. The dead reduced to mere verbal abbreviation.”
I disagree, in part, with the professor in this film. On one hand, he’s right – the Holocaust was an unprecedented horror. But to me, to horrors of the holocaust deserve more than a one-sentence description; that is what the Nazis would do. The survivor’s stories (and those who didn’t survive and can’t speak for themselves) deserve to be told. In Professor Rosenbaum’s book, “The Myth of Moral Justice”, we learn that “the acknowledgment of the story and the discovery of the truth are important moral values.” Each story that is told can reveal another aspect of the truth and acknowledges the atrocity of the Holocaust, if only a shadow of that true horror. To “etceterize” as the student does in the film simply acknowledges that we cannot know everything that happened during this terrible time; we cannot know every dimension of the violence perpetuated, of the grief experienced and the anguish suffered by the victims. To “etceterize” the Holocaust expresses the idea that the true depth of the unprecedented horror cannot be known, but at the same time it acknowledges that the Holocaust was “unprecedented”, “evil” and more (thus, etcetera).
I’m part Cherokee and the Trail of Tears is a particularly sensitive topic among some people that I know. There are numerous historical accounts, books, paintings, documentaries and more about this atrocity that some of my distant ancestors experienced. I still remember when I first learned about the Trail of Tears in school so many years ago and, in retrospect, I’m glad that we didn’t end that lesson by a curt acknowledgment from my teacher that it was an “unprecedented horror.” I believe that we, as a society, should “etceterize” these horrors of history in the sense that we should admit to the “evil unprecedented” and then acknowledge that, in the many ways – either through paintings, books, novel or whatever device – these are but facets of what happened, the whole of which we cannot fully grasp. In this way atrocities expressed through art are given a voice, a story is told, but it is only one side, one facet of the true dimension of the unprecedented horror. To me, to leave the Trail of Tears to the simple description of it as an “unprecedented horror” fails to tell the stories of the victims — my ancestors — and doesn’t help me grasp any dimension whatsoever of the severity of this atrocity, why it happened, how it affected the lives of the Cherokee, etc.
