The Call of Memory

On a spring day five years ago, I stood inside the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and prayed. I sought fervently to believe that what appeared so heartbreakingly before me was an illusion. That it could not have happened so transparently. I imagined the world from inside a German cattle car, which, only 65 years prior, served to actualize Hitler’s genocidal ambitions by carrying tens of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers.

I promised the six million souls looking down on me that I’d always remember them. But I have since, intermittently, found myself contemplating the ramifications of that commitment. What exactly are the responsibilities of the rememberer? Is he to sing? To safeguard? To study? Perhaps simply to know — to be aware of the horrors that once besieged European Jewry?

Too often, in the weeks leading up to Holocaust Remembrance Day, we forget how to remember. The lessons that emerge from the Holocaust, though all rooted in tremendous gravity, are not all centered around pain and suffering. Anecdotally, as well as in diaries, journal and survivor testimonies, we bear witness to stories of profound decency in unthinkable conditions.

We draw strength from the arresting bravery of some 400 ghetto fighters who mounted a rebellion in Warsaw on the eve of Passover, 1943, with just a few automatic weapons. We learn of the poet Paul Célan, who translated William Shakespeare’s sonnets while imprisoned in Romania. We turn our gaze to the pervasive stream of paintings, drawings, music and writing that were left behind in the camps.

In the eyes of scholar John Felstiner, creative resistance is “more human than blowing up a train, because of everything it takes to make a piece of art or a poem. The personhood is what the Nazis were trying to destroy, to try to erase from the globe.” The rememberer, in my mind, exists primarily to champion the victory of personhood. To emulate the daring pronouncement so many victims made — that they were, albeit in bleak and deplorable circumstances, alive and breathing. He exists to assert the legacy of the victims as impenetrable and lasting.

But why? We need to pay tribute to these courageous individuals because, in many ways, they show us how to live, and how to remember; that to remember is to live, and that we have a choice now — as they did then — to maintain our humanity in a cry of tolerance against fascism, or to remain reticent, apathetic and uninvolved.

In reflecting on the future of memory, Hedi Fried, survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and founder of the Stockholm Storytelling Project, says it is especially important for the younger generation to learn her story, one that is hard enough for her, who experienced it directly, to understand. But she begs us to remember another imperative: namely, that “democracy dies if you don’t work for it.” It crumbles, much as it did across this century of blood and loss — in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia and now in Darfur, where genocide still rages.

We are not helpless, but we are also not as helpful as we could be. We, at this historic crossroads, have a unique responsibility to validate the lessons of the past. At this juncture between life and death, between what we can see and what remains to be seen, passive commemoration does not suffice. It cannot. If we are to build a world centered on dignity, tolerance, and respect for the Other, we have to make it such. Holocaust Remembrance Day lasts for 24 hours. Yet the realities of the Holocaust are eternal. They require us to be constantly cognizant and vigorously vigilant.


Many today still do not taste the liberties a young Sophie Scholl once dreamed of when she left the word “Freedom” on a scrap of paper before being led to her execution. There are still dictatorships impinging on people’s basic human rights; there are still maligning grips of revisionism — those which seek to distort, deflect, twist and undermine our collective consciousness. There are still violent expressions of racism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism.

In some ways, none of us are really free — not until we have risen to the challenge that memory has bestowed upon our generation. For the world shakes as I write; it erupts with uncertainty and flings to the fore a barrage of recurrent tensions and chaos.

Our only hope lies in remembering how to remember.

New Age Vision: TEDxTeen 2011

We are the music makers
we are the dreamers of dreams
standing by lone sea-breakers
and sitting by desolate streams
world losers and world forsake-ers
on whom the pale moon gleams
for we are the movers and shakers
of the world forever it seems
-Arthur O'Shaughnessy



This past weekend, I had the privilege of joining 200 young global leaders at the annual TEDxTeen Conference in New York City. An independently organized event (by definition), this was a coming together of thinkers and doers who don't believe much in the status quo. Or in the narratives that society has established for them as invincible. Rebels, really: the round pegs in the square holes. New York skyscrapers in rural Scottish villages. Clear skies on gloomy afternoons. People who like singing in a silent auction. Who like running in a walking world. Who don’t subscribe to notions of apathy or indifference, but to endlessly bending the arc of history: towards hope, towards progress.

TEDxTeen inspires young people to collapse the barriers that limit them, power through the gates of their dreams and create lasting and effective change.

To be unafraid.

Because there's a blossoming world around them, full of lilies—all waiting to be watered and to be shared. There is a teary-eyed world around them, too, where dictators lurk and ravage. Where basic freedoms are denied and where the quest for human rights is subdued, suppressed, subverted.

There are cries to be heard by them, also. And so we need them empowered. We need warriors of peace, like Amr Ashraf, and disruptive innovators like Sheel Tyle. We need those who are charged with missions. Not those who are born into a mold that directs them, but those who direct the molds that would otherwise reject them.

One day. Three sessions. Fourteen speakers. We were hit by a blizzard, you might say. And our minds were zapped, pinged, prodded, and teased. But they were also uplifted—catapulted into a different dimension where truth was put on trial and re-examined, and where ideas of "possible" were challenged, and augmented. The atmosphere in the auditorium was electric; I cannot remember the last time I felt so invigorated and alive.


I could spend a wealth of time telling you about the outstanding individuals who took the stage and rocked it. Literally shook the very foundation of it because they were as honest and daring as anything on it. I could tell you about how Natalie Warne rescued Chicago from the rain and a complicity that would undermine the fate of 30,000 child soldiers caught in the vicious web of Africa's longest running war. Or about how Zander Srodes boldly set off fireworks on the beach one summer day, met a woman and a mentor and fell in an unlikely love with sea turtles. Or maybe I could relate the poignant story of Dan Eldon's journey into the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, and how the image of him dancing in the heart of Kenya with a scary monkey mask will, quite assuredly, stay with me forever.

And yet: these talks will soon be online at TEDxTeen.com. I invite you to watch them there and to share them with your twitter followers and anonymous extraordinaires.

Instead, for a moment today, I want to tell you about a thirteen-year-old boy named Osiris, whom I met at the conference and chatted with briefly over Vitamin Water. A robotics prodigy, Osiris is a freshman at a technological high school in Atlanta, Georgia—with a unique desire to live. Indeed, vibrancy and tenacity emanate from him with force and conviction to the likes of which I have seldom borne witness. I asked him why he was here. He replied that, when he was younger (likely when he was 10 or 11), his father tried unsuccessfully to introduce him to TED. Recently, however, he has re-discovered the online phenomenon, and watches several videos nightly.

But Osiris didn’t travel hundreds of miles to Manhattan simply because he’s a TED enthusiast. He has a new vision for the world—as he described it to me, a world which thinks critically as opposed to comfortably. To that end, Osiris shared with me an experience he had not long ago with a group of his classmates. They were working hard on a science project constructing an electric car. Osiris took the initiative and led the engineering effort. His classmates, after recognizing an initial failure in the car's functionality, presumptuously decided to destruct it—undermining all the work he had done. Instead of pausing to consider how they might implement a constructive solution to the problem, they chose not even to identify it. This frustrated Osiris, who claimed he knew how to fix the car but was not given the chance.

In a treasured moment toward the end of our conversation, Osiris revealed to me that he often gets bullied and teased in school. He described an incident of confrontation with an older teenager who decided to pick on him for no apparent reason. In those situations, he told me, I want to scream: Why are you doing this to me? I'm trying my hardest!

He then turned to me and fell silent. Yet before I could reassure him, he added: Or maybe I'm not.


By the end of the day, inspiration loomed over my head like a scent that paralyzes on a spring morning in Zurich, or a botanical garden in Haifa—there, where those lilies protest to the sun: more attention, please. It twirled around me like a drug one would have thought to be destructive, but which actually sustains. And by the time I was ready to leave, the scent had entrapped me, and for a moment I was far away in those cities, negotiating with the wind and bending over to smell the flowers.

For a moment I was there. For a moment I was anything.