Stop.

 I am sitting here, trying to write a paper about the destruction of a race of people, and analyzing my country's response.

Honestly, I don't want to do it. I really don't want to write 25 pages about how throughout WWII and for the first decade afterward, the population of the United States was so overwhelmingly anti-Semitic that we first turned away a group of people being tortured and killed in their homes, and then told them that even once they were safe in our country we did not want to hear about what they had endured.

It's hard to imagine a time when the Holocaust was not widely talked about. I, for one, had always assumed, naively I suppose, that education about the Holocaust had been widespread since the monstrous event occurred. I was wrong.

Not only did widespread public education and recognition of the horrors of that time not begin until the 1970s, it is not even so widespread today as I thought.

Last semester I began my work on the Terezin Project, which I have been involved with for two semesters now. It is a project to integrate the arts into education, centering on the concentration camp of Theresienstadt (Terezin by its Czech name), which was located outside Prague. Theresienstadt was a model concentration camp, where the prisoners were allowed to practice the arts so that Hitler could show the world what a wonderful place he had set aside for the Jews. The camp was even referred to as "The Fuhrer's Gift to the Jews." But in this camp people died, of disease, starvation, and overcrowding. Those that did not die in Terezin were sent to Auschwitz.

There were children in Terezin. 15,000 children.

132 survived.

When I went to work for the project for the first time, I accompanied my professor and a couple other students to Wilson high school, where we did workshops with sophomores. Wilson is considered one of the best public high schools in DC. None of the children we had worked with knew what the Holocaust was until that school year, when their history teacher taught a special unit on it. It seemed crazy to me that kids could have not learned what the Holocaust was until they were 14 or 15 years old. I remember knowing about the Holocaust when I was 6 or 7 years old, and beginning to learn about it in school in 5th grade.

So I am writing this paper. And I really don't want to. I have a very hard time accepting that a group of people could be so narrow-minded, although it is very far from the only time in history that stratification of this kind has occurred in the United States.

I don't want to focus on the negative. I want to look ahead and focus on the hope of a brighter future. We will always need to look at the past, of course, in order to understand the mistakes that humanity has allowed to occur. But what we do not need is to allow our children to live in a world in which that intense cruelty is more than marginally imaginable. Unfortunately genocide continues to occur almost every day; in Rwanda, Serbia, Kosovo, Darfur. And although we look at the Holocaust and continually promise "Never Again," we turn a blind eye to these other situations.

We need to stop. We need to put our feet down and draw an uncrossable line. Even as there is a deep-seated isolationism associated with the American identity, we need to find ways to love each other globally, with more than a national radius. What we really need is to stop pretending that bad things aren't happening, or that they aren't any of our business.

Because that's what allowed the Holocaust to happen.