Abstract
As I worked on this book at the Center for Advanced Holocaust in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the route to my office took me past the Washington Monument and then through an entry and corridors whose walls are inscribed with the words of an American idealism that stands in the sharpest contrast to the aims of Nazi Germany and the “Final Solution” of the so-called Jewish question, which marked so indelibly the aspirations of that genocidal regime. Those inscriptions include Thomas Jefferson’s July 4, 1776, affirmations in the Declaration of Independence: All men are created equal. There are inalienable human rights, including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They also include a September 27, 1979, statement by Jimmy Carter, the American president who appointed the Commission on the Holocaust that led to the building of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Out of our memory… of the Holocaust,” said Carter, “we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world… fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide… We must harness the outrage of our memories to stamp out oppression wherever it exists. We must understand that human rights and human dignity are indivisible.”
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I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural then yes let it be these are small distinctions where do we see it from is the question
Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World
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Notes
Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 6.
Adrienne Rich, Holocaust Politics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 25.
David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: American and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968)
David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1993),
Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 344.
Ralph Ellison’s introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of his Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. xv.
Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” in American Ground: Vistas, Visions, and Revisions, ed. Robert H. Fossum and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1988), p. 350.
Philip Hallie: Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994)
Philip Hallie In the Eye of the Hurricane: Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).
Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Gilbert Stuart (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 308.
Hallie, “Cruelty: The Empirical Evil,” in Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, eds., Facing Evil: Confronting the Dreadful Power behind Genocide, Terrorism, and Cruelty (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2001).
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© 2005 John K. Roth
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Roth, J.K. (2005). The Holocaust and the Common Good. In: Ethics During and After the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513105_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513105_12
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