What Happens When No One is Left to Remember?

Remember this famous photo?
The Associated Press reported yesterday that 90 year old Edith Shain, of Los Angeles, says that she is the nurse in the photo. It was taken in 1945 in Times Square on the day Japan surrendered, ending World War II. Famous photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped the shutter just as the sailor and nurse, strangers to each other, kissed in the midst of a jubilant crowd. They went their separate ways so quickly that Mr. Eisenstaedt could not record their names.

If indeed Ms. Shain is the nurse, her age reminds us that those who remember World War II are getting up in years. At some point in the not too distant future no one will be left to remember. What happens then?

It's one thing to read or hear about events as tumultuous as World War II but it's not the same as having lived during that time. How well will we the successors apply the lessons learned?

I have long been shocked and intrigued by the Holocaust. How could it have happened? I've read and watched movies about it and have visited Holocaust museums and exhibits in Jerusalem, Washington, D.C., and Cleveland. But not having experienced the Holocaust first hand, it remains at least to some extent an abstraction.

Every now and then I'm jolted by a first person account of some horrible event or, interestingly, something comparatively mild. Two recent articles in The Plain Dealer did just that.

The first was a story about former Army infantryman Joe Pucci, who was part of the Allied invasion at the seaside resort of Anzio, in Italy, in January 1944. It was a surprise sea-based attack behind enemy lines met with enormous resistance by the German army. It was awful. The Allied troops were pinned down on the beach for four treacherous months. But that's not what struck me so much. The jolt came from the realization that Mr. Pucci was drafted when he was a junior in high school. A junior! In short order he found himself on a troop ship sailing for North Africa. Imagine, one day you're a high school kid in Cleveland and then suddenly you're on a troop ship making its way to a battle in North Africa. Talk about growing up fast! How different my life would have been had I experienced all that at such an early age.

And then there is the story of Betty Gold who at age 66 is committed to telling young people how the Nazis wiped her home town off the map. She grew up in Trochenbrod, a Jewish farming settlement in Poland. On August 9, 1942, the Nazis forced most of the inhabitants into the town's center and shot them. Some 4,500 people were murdered that day. Ms. Gold, 11 years old then, was one of 16 family members who hid behind a fake wall in a shed behind her family's home. They huddled close together in silence and fear waiting for the Nazis to come. That's when a toddler, her cousin's daughter, began to cry and wouldn't stop.

"The mother frantically tried to shush her daughter," the article recounts. "She rocked her, she spoke softly to her, she kissed her. But the shrieks intensified. The other people in the tiny space bit their lips, their eyes darting nervously. The mother clamped one hand over the girl's mouth and the other her soft neck. She squeezed her daughter's windpipe. Hard. The crying stopped."

Imagine the horror of that day and ask--what in our experience comes close to that?

It's fitting that we have events like Veterans Day to help us remember the important lessons learned in the past. But a part of me wonders what will happen when persons like Edith Shain, Joe Pucci and Betty Gold are no longer around to tell their first hand accounts. What happens when no one is left to remember? We will of course remember...but, admittedly, it's just not the same.