Existing genocide, racism examined at Holocaust luncheon

By: Kimberly Lien

Posted: 4/24/07

With the last century, 150 to 200 million people have died from genocide and war, according to oral historian and activist Lani Silver.

As director of the James Byrd Jr. Racism Oral History Project, Silver conducted and collected approximately 2,500 interviews on racism in America.

James Byrd Jr. was a black man who was dragged through the streets of Jasper, Texas in 1998 by three white supremacists just because of the color of his skin.

"I think there's a crisis in society," Silver said, "where we're not learning the lessons of the Holocaust. We need to educate ourselves about what's happening in the world."

Silver said she believes racism to be the biggest problem in America today, because it has changed from overt bigotry to an invisible, hard to see, hard to recognize form.

Sandeep Pabla, a senior majoring in English, attended the luncheon partly because it was offered as an extra credit opportunity, but also because she has interest in learning about the Holocaust.

She is currently enrolled in a Holocaust literature class where she read books such as: "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl," "Night" and "Life with a Star."

A lack of knowledge is one of the reasons why Pabla said she believed genocides have continued to go on after the Holocaust.

"Events like this one can help people understand it better," Pabla said.

The topic of last Thursday's Genocide Holocaust Week luncheon - which Silver and Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights founding director John K. Roth spoke at - was "How can we create a world where 'Never Again' means never again?"

Hillel of Silicon Valley, the MOSAIC Cross Cultural Center and San Jose State University organized Genocide Holocaust Week to educate and inform the campus community about the tragedies of the Holocaust and other genocides.

"If you don't keep calling attention to it," Silver said, "then you've lost something valuable."

Silver was also the founder of the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project.

The Bay Area Oral History Project conducted over 1,700 interviews with Holocaust survivors from 1981 to 1996.

In 1993, after Steven Spielberg released "Schindler's List" and discovered that most survivors had not written down or recorded their personal oral histories, he created the Shoah Foundation for Visual History and Education.

Spielberg reached out to Silver after learning of the Bay Area Oral History Project, and asked for her guidance and assistance as a consultant for the Shoah Foundation.

As a result, the Shoah Foundation has been able to record and archive more than 53,000 oral histories all over the world, Silver said.

"Too many people don't know about the Holocaust or what it was about," Silver said, "or Cambodia or Rwanda, even in my own family."

When Silver asked her 16-year-old niece what the Holocaust was and how many people died as a result of it, she had no idea.

After asking her niece to guess how many people lost their lives in the Holocaust, her niece replied, "I don't know, 3,000?"

"If we understood the lessons of the Holocaust," Silver said, "we wouldn't let Darfur happen."

Nearing the end of her speech, Silver asked the audience why they thought there were continued acts of war and genocide that have occurred since after the end of the Holocaust.

Answers from the audience included: lack of education, need for power, fear and religious extremism.

Roth was the second speaker of the luncheon. In addition to being the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, he is also an Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy.

"If you stop laughing now," Roth said, "then you help reduce the next genocide."

Roth said he believes that one of the ways people can help to educate others about racism and genocide is to stand up to those who might think discriminatory statements are comedic or acceptable banter.

"The Holocaust was not only genocide," Roth said, "but a form of genocide that was unprecedented."

The systematic and methodological extermination of the Jewish people should have been an event that taught us something about the horror and tragedy of genocide, Roth said.