"The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it"
About this Quote
Silence is the real accomplice in Wiesenthal's moral universe, and he indicts it with a prosecutor's rhythm: schools, Church, home. The sentence works because it distributes blame across the institutions that shape a child's reality, then shows how each one can become a mechanism for erasure. "Silence" in schools isn't just omission; it's curricular cowardice that turns history into trivia. The Church "through its forgiveness" is the sharpest barb: forgiveness, usually framed as virtue, becomes premature absolution when it skips truth-telling and accountability. It suggests a postwar impulse to smooth over collaboration and complicity in the name of social peace, laundering the past into "moving on."
Then he lands on the home, the most intimate arena, where denial isn't ideological so much as protective - parents hiding shame, guilt, or fear behind a closed door. Wiesenthal understands that the first censorship is often familial, a refusal to contaminate the next generation with unbearable facts. But that protection is itself a form of harm: it seeds ignorance, and ignorance is the soil where repetition grows.
Context matters. Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to tracking Nazi perpetrators, isn't arguing for abstract "awareness". He's warning about a specific postwar pattern: a society eager to rebuild, institutions tempted to trade memory for stability, and children raised inside a carefully managed amnesia. "The new generation has to hear" is a demand for intergenerational honesty, not to punish the young with inherited guilt, but to arm them against the comforting stories nations tell when they want to stop feeling responsible.
Then he lands on the home, the most intimate arena, where denial isn't ideological so much as protective - parents hiding shame, guilt, or fear behind a closed door. Wiesenthal understands that the first censorship is often familial, a refusal to contaminate the next generation with unbearable facts. But that protection is itself a form of harm: it seeds ignorance, and ignorance is the soil where repetition grows.
Context matters. Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to tracking Nazi perpetrators, isn't arguing for abstract "awareness". He's warning about a specific postwar pattern: a society eager to rebuild, institutions tempted to trade memory for stability, and children raised inside a carefully managed amnesia. "The new generation has to hear" is a demand for intergenerational honesty, not to punish the young with inherited guilt, but to arm them against the comforting stories nations tell when they want to stop feeling responsible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|
More Quotes by Simon
Add to List
