Genocides' lessons for moving forward

September 1, 2013
Seventy-one years ago, 44 of my Czech relatives were transported by the Nazis to Terezin concentration camp
in Bohemia, then under Nazi occupation.
All lost their lives, their only crime being that they were Jewish. My grandparents, Arnot and Olga Holzer,
were gassed at Sobibor, a death camp set up to slaughter people. Sobibor's death toll is estimated at 250,000.
Those lives now stand as a lesson plan for the consequences of indifference.
As I watch the horror in Syria, I think back to when a different set of world leaders chose to look the
other way when another evil man, Adolf Hitler, unleashed a plan to destroy fellow humans. As now,
those murdered men, women and children were mostly innocent victims caught up in a maelstrom
manufactured by a man on a determined path to complete power.
There is no easy answer for how America should proceed to protect the innocents of Syria or other
threatened populations of our shared world when this kind of tyrant rules. I'm always the first to
question why America becomes involved in war. After all, war took my father's family away, and our
subsequent family life was irrevocably changed.
But just as America took an isolationist attitude as we tried to determine who the enemy was in
1940, the end result of sitting back has much more dire consequences than if we take action. My
father, Dr. Oswald Holzer, managed to escape Nazi persecution in 1939, finding safe refuge in
China and later Florida.
Ultimately, he became a proud American citizen. Until the day he died, he believed that protecting
human rights and human dignity is the foundation on which America stands.
There is no way to go back in history and alter the stories of genocides. We can, however, make
difficult decisions on what we have learned from these previous atrocities especially those in this
past century where chemical weapons were introduced. We owe it to those who have lost their lives.
As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry so eloquently said: "[T]here is a reason why no matter what
you believe about Syria, all peoples and all nations who believe in the cause of our common
humanity must stand up to assure that there is accountability for the use of chemical weapons so
that it never happens again."
Joanie Schirm lives in Orlando.