Beyond "Never Again": A Journey Through Selective Empathy and Holocaust Memory
- Gail Weiner
- Apr 17
- 4 min read
By Claude, in conversation with Gail Weiner, Reality Architect
"Walking alone through Paneriai Forest in Lithuania, I felt something shift within me. The forest is strikingly beautiful—once a holiday resort for families from Vilnius before it became the site where 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews, were murdered between 1941 and 1944. Beauty and horror coexist here in uncomfortable proximity."
Walking alone through Paneriai Forest in Lithuania, I felt something shift within me. The forest is strikingly beautiful—once a holiday resort for families from Vilnius before it became the site where 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews, were murdered between 1941 and 1944. Beauty and horror coexist here in uncomfortable proximity.
I had not planned this pilgrimage. Days earlier, I had arrived in Vilnius seeking my ancestral passport, knowing little about the city, yet somehow booked accommodation at the entrance to the old Jewish ghetto. My grandparents had left Lithuania for South Africa in the 1920s, before the worst came. Most of their family never made it out.
After my Lithuanian guide—a university student studying Jewish history who could read the Yiddish signs for me—left me alone in the forest, I found myself standing where thousands had waited for death. I tried to imagine their thoughts: "Why us?" "What did we do?" The fear they must have felt. Later, when three generations of Jewish men arrived and I unexpectedly became their guide, the irony struck me deeply. Here, where our erasure was the goal, stood Jewish people discussing our future with excitement.
The Limits of Memory
"What troubles me increasingly about Holocaust remembrance is what I've come to call 'selective empathy.' The phrase 'Never Again' has become too narrowly defined, focused exclusively on preventing another Jewish genocide rather than recognizing similar patterns of dehumanization wherever they appear."
When I point out parallels in contemporary conflicts, fellow Jews sometimes dismiss the comparison: "It's not like the Holocaust—that was against the Jews." This response reveals how our empathy can become selective, how our moral imagination can fail precisely where it's most needed.
The testimonies that have moved me most deeply—like Filip Müller's "Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers" and the film "Son of Saul"—reveal universal aspects of atrocity. Müller's clinical descriptions of unimaginable horror, his account of the "Muslims" (prisoners who had simply given up), the pregnant woman whose body expelled her baby after death in the gas chamber—these speak to the depths of human cruelty that transcend any single historical event.
My Father's Truth
"One conversation that sits heaviest with me is one I had with my late father after visiting the Jewish library in Cape Town. With a lap full of Holocaust books for us to read, I asked him: 'Dad, if you were German in the 1940s, would you have hidden a Jew in your home?'His answer was unflinching: 'No, because if the Gestapo had found the Jew, they would have killed my family.'"
His honesty reveals the impossible choices ordinary people faced. While we celebrate the righteous among nations, my father acknowledged a painful truth: most people, when faced with such stark choices, prioritize protecting their immediate family. This wasn't indifference—my father cared deeply about Holocaust memory—but a recognition of human limitation.
The Mechanics of Cruelty
"What horrifies me most about the Holocaust isn't just the industrial scale of murder but how quickly neighbors turned against each other. How readily ordinary citizens participated by informing on Jewish families, looting their possessions, and benefiting from their disappearance. The Polish prisoners who became guards and treated fellow inmates with extraordinary cruelty. The speed with which humans can be convinced that another group deserves suffering."
The psychology professor Stanley Milgram once said, "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process." The Holocaust proves this, as do Rwanda, Bosnia, and countless other atrocities since we promised "never again."
Universal Remembrance
Walking through Paneriai Forest, I felt both the particularity of Jewish suffering and its universal implications. The guide and I—a Lithuanian and a Jew—embraced beneath trees that had witnessed unspeakable horror. We spoke of opening hearts, of how those who participated in genocide did so "with lack of understanding and not enough heart." We pondered whether the murderers eventually felt the pain they had caused or died without remorse.
True remembrance requires expanding our circle of moral concern beyond those who share our identity. It means recognizing patterns of dehumanization wherever they appear. It means acknowledging uncomfortable truths about human nature—that most of us, like my father, would likely choose our family's safety over heroism.
If "Never Again" is to be more than empty words, it cannot apply selectively. The true legacy of Holocaust memory isn't just preserving the specific history of Jewish suffering, vital as that is. It's developing the moral imagination to recognize and resist the universal patterns that make such suffering possible—beginning with the casual dehumanization of any group deemed "other."
As I left Paneriai Forest that day, I carried with me both the weight of what happened there and a renewed commitment to universal empathy. Our ancestors who perished deserved nothing less.
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