Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day

This also marks the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Week.

There's a chill in the air. It's uncanny the way things feel so familiar. Reading the news feels emotionally synonymous with reading history in so many ways. It feels like 1933.

Given this, I was asked to write a post to commemorate and honestly, I struggled with what to write. I could give you a history lesson, but you've gotten plenty of the traditional ones, and your social media feeds will be filled with those. I also strive to do more than memorialize when I write these posts. I want you to take something away that is useful. We need more than doom and mourning right now.

So, let's do it two ways this time and see if I can tie it together for you. Today, let's do Part 1, and start with the history lesson you didn't get (trans and queer readers are more likely to be familiar with this one) and then tomorrow let's move onto something slightly more practical with Part 2. I'll give you a homework assignment. Don't worry, it won't be graded and I won't test you. And I really think you'll appreciate it.

The History Lesson You Didn't Get

I'll be straightforward with you, I didn't want to write on this topic today. I balked at the keyboard. but it's important. I want to focus on what to do in the present and the immediate future as we face so many of the same malicious forces, but I'd be lying if I said my thoughts weren't on this history every single day since the last election. After all, the fascist forces working against us are using this same history as their playbook, so history is present.

But where to begin?

I could take time to acknowledge that Jews suffered so much under the Nazi regime, and that this should not be minimized, but that we should never forget that the Nazis also target others, such as the Roma, People of Color, autistic people, all disabled people, queer people, and trans people. Did I forget someone? Like today's fascists, the entire history of the Nazi's is grounded in the same white supremacy that existed in the US before and after the war. They are linked by more than ideology, but also by history and collaboration. Hitler learned from white supremacists in the US, and the US hired thousands of top Nazi officials, scientists, engineers, et al to work for the US government after the end of the war, even those who were tried at Nuremberg. This isn't a matter of conspiracy, it's a matter of record, and a matter of reference.

As a queer trans person, I could remind you of Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. I could remind you of the thriving queer culture in Berlin up until 1933, and how queer people would come from all over the world to have a haven where they could meet and know each other, live and thrive. I could remind you of the academic study and the state of queer and trans medical science and the gender affirming surgeries being performed. I could tell you about how my siblings lived and how they died. I could tell you about how even after the concentration camps were emptied after the war, that queer people were not liberated by the Allies, they were relocated to new prisons. I could tell you absurdly infuriating stories of people who should have known better, like how George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, of all things, kept a list of queer people he encountered during his work in WWII and turned it in to out them to the authorities.

I could remind you of the picture you've seen a thousand times of Nazis burning books. I could remind you that when you were taught about these burned books, you were not told what information was contained within the books.

Those books were from Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. The books were about queer people. The books were about trans people.

What good does it do to be taught that books were burned and how awful it is, but to not be educated about the content of the books? There's a reason: complicity.

I'm a heretic and I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Books are not sacred.

It's not the simple burning of stacks of paper that is the atrocity. That's not what people are aiming to destroy when they burn books. It is the destruction of humanity, culture, knowledge, ideas, and collective memory. Those books contained information on our medical needs and how to address them, they contained records on our existence, histories of our queer and trans peoples and cultures, and even our mythology and legends. Tens of thousands of books were burned, so many of which had no copies elsewhere stored in the world. It was essentially the burning of the Library at Alexandria for queer and trans people. This is called memoricide and is an aspect of genocide.

When it comes to queer and trans people, effects of memoricide are especially heightened. Without our histories, stories, and connection, we are often left isolated. It doesn't make us any less queer or trans, but it does make us feel like there is something wrong with us, often something disgusting or monstrous. Something that deserves to be suppressed or cut out. Something that deserves death, either metaphorical or in the most real sense.

Furthermore, this doesn't happen only within ourselves, but our societies. We are not allowed to exist, to know ourselves, to find ourselves, to liberate ourselves. As a result, we often either suffer a lifetime of pain, or we don't survive at all. The genocide of queer, and especially trans people, is so efficient and pervasive, that people don't individually even need to consciously know they're doing it to us. Memoricide is often enough to do the job. It's enough that society has already been deliberately designed this way through cycles throughout thousands of years of history when we have been out and open, and then crushed under the forces of colonization, religious oppression, and white supremacy.

Every time you are shown those images without the context of what these books were, the person making a decision not to tell you this context becomes one of the book burners. They are not physically burning those books, but they are contributing to the legacy of destruction of our humanity, culture, knowledge, and collective memory. There is no distinction between lighting the match and purposely hiding the knowledge. They are one and the same. This is complicity with memoricide, with genocide.

Have some grace for some of your schoolteachers who often themselves didn't know what was contained within those books, because they often were not taught. Some were taught, but chose against telling you. That's their conscience to reckon with. However, from now until your death, you will never have an excuse to not remind people what was contained within those books anytime you see that image shared. You will never again be able to say you didn't know. So speak when you see those images and when people talk of burning books. Make it known. We can't preserve what was contained within those books, it is gone. But you can preserve the memory of what has been taken from us, that I will forever grieve. That our communities will forever grieve. Refuse to be complicit in memoricide. Refuse to be complicit in genocide.

And while this was all happening, they took our people off to the camps along with the rest of peoples targeted. And when all was said and done, when the war was over, the Allies did nothing to acknowledge, adequately record, or properly alleviate their oppression. Instead, they perpetuated it in their own fashion.

There is no simple post that can begin to scratch the surface of what happened, even of what was hidden and obscured. But let this be a foundation of knowledge for you to carry forward and build upon.

If you're subscribed (you're subscribed, right?), look for Part 2 tomorrow in your inbox.

no ends, only means