Remembrance

As with most of the current advancements in society, events in the past have greatly affected the way we live today. Language originated from communication through physical actions and ancient pictographs, and the Arabic number system used today came from the Indian Brahmi numerals in the 3^rd century. We learn about the history of these advancements in school, but it’s easy to forget them. After all, why should we have to remember these details of the past, as long as we continue to progress into the future?

But the progression to today’s society has not always been a clean road like the one from fire, to candlesticks, to oil lamps, to fluorescent light bulbs. There are some things that were accomplished through immoral, inhumane means, and for this reason, people believe that ignorance is bliss. But in the case of science, is it right to be ignorant of the millions of people who have undergone controversial and unfair medical treatment, all for the sake of propelling science forward? Should we just forget about the millions of lives that were lost in the medical human experimentations of the Holocaust?

Despite the evidence that is prevalent in the hundreds of stories of family members and friends who have survived the Holocaust, there are those who deny that the Holocaust happened at all. Those in denial argue that the Nazis had no official intention to exterminate the Jews, that the poison gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp never even existed, and that bodies were never used for human experiments. They also distort the facts of the Holocaust by claiming that the deaths in the concentration camps were primarily caused by starvation or disease but not policy, that the six millions Jewish deaths is an exaggeration, and that the stories told by survivors and left behind in the writings of victims were fabricated. These people wish, for various reasons, for the Holocaust to be forgotten, for the stories of millions of lives that have been mutilated and lost to be erased from our history books and documentaries.

But the truth is, 6 million Jewish men, women, and children were killed in concentration camps, and thousands more were executed by Nazi courts for minor crimes. In a cold, hard, heartless sense, it makes sense that the Nazis used the bodies of the killed for experimentation; German scientists had been complaining to the government about the lack of supply to conduct medical experiments. So when Nazi courts began to execute the Jewish by the thousands in the 1930s and 1940s, it became tragically convenient for their bodies to be used by German anatomists, whether or not the scientists were allied with the Nazis. Some anatomists that did hold Nazi beliefs conducted experiments in the sole attempt to advance the racial and ideological theories of the Nazi worldview; Josef Mengele, an officer and physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, directed experiments in order to determine how people of varying races reacted to contagious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and infectious hepatitis. August Hirt, chairman at the Reich University in Strasbourg, conducted experiments in an attempt to “establish Jewish racial inferiority.” Other scientists attempted to develop procedures for the mass sterilization of Jews and other groups that Nazis considered inferior. These unethical experiments were always conducted on people without their consent, and they often resulted in death, permanent disfiguration, or disability. Medical records and images confirming these experiments, and the stories told by survivors and witnesses all negate the claims of those in denial of the Holocaust.

Why should we remember the corrupt past of science and medicine? Thousands of victims lost their lives in brutal mutilation; maybe people would like to forget about a violent past and instead focus on a brighter future. However, it was also these experiments that resulted in new discoveries in science that have allowed for such advancement in science today, as well as the Nuremburg Code that prohibits unethical human experimentation. It’s important to keep in mind that society as it is now did not always have such innocent origins. Even by remembering the lives that had been lost in these human experiments, we cannot undo the injustice that had been brought upon them, but we are at least giving them the respect and remembrance that they deserve.