The war waged by Hitler and his accomplices was a war against the Jewish people, Jewish culture and thus, Jewish memory. If the twisted philosophy of the Nazi regime was to eradicate Jewish memory, then it is our duty to remember the Jewish lives that perished and to keep Jewish memory alive. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, explains in his preface his reasons for writing the latest edition of his memoir Night: “[I] believe that [I] have a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.” The number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling. It is imperative that we remember their stories in order to give meaning to their survival. As Wiesel writes, “[The survivor] has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory.” Wiesel has painstakingly endowed us, the next generation, with the knowledge of the moral depravity during the Holocaust as well as the importance of remembrance. Now it is up to us to apply this knowledge and to fight against future genocides.

As a Jewish teenager growing up in the United States, I believe that it is essential for our generation to remember not only the Holocaust, but also the debacle of our country’s lack of support for the Jewish community in its most crucial time of need. In his book, Abandonment of the Jews, David Wyman asserts that: “The United States was willing to attempt almost nothing to save the Jews” (5). Indeed, the United States government had been cognizant of the Holocaust since 1939, but took no action. Quite to the contrary, it set strict Jewish immigration quotas, accepting only 21,000 refugees from Europe. It has been estimated that 190,000 to 200,000 Jews would have been able to find refuge in the United States if these quotas had been lifted. In fact, the United States accepted far fewer Jews