In this Sunday’s USA Today, I read an article marking the twentieth anniversary of the launching of famed director Stephen Spielberg’s SHOAH project. As I read through the interview, one comment struck me more than the rest. The SHOAH project was initially created as a way to have a lasting eyewitness record of the most horrific event of modern times, the Nazi Holocaust. Video interviews with aged survivors in more than 50 countries serve as a lasting reminder of a road we must never travel again. Yet in the intervening twenty years from inception to today, the project has become more, a repository for eyewitness accounts of more than just the cruel, wanton murder of 12 million Europeans (half of them Jews). The 1994 exterminations of Rawandan Tutsis, and the 1937 Nanjing Massacre have been added to the rolls, proving that memories of genocide and persecution, hatred and ignorance, and all the horrors that come with them, belong to no one group. With SHOAH (what Spielberg refers to as his greatest accomplishment outside of his family), we see a lesson that humanity must learn if it is to continue to thrive. Tolerance must be universal, or it is not tolerance. That is a simple fact, and one we ignore at our own peril.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 12:23:04 +0000