By John Di Genio and Albert J. Cupo
In January, the calendar throws you two dates that ought to make you stop in your tracks, look up at the cold gray sky, and ask what we’re doing with ourselves. Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Jan. 20) and Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27). Two days that scream from opposite ends of history and geography, but the echoes they leave behind sound eerily alike.
On one day, you’ve got a preacher in a suit so sharp it could cut glass, standing on the steps of a nation’s hypocrisy, daring it to make good on the promises it scribbled in ink. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t have a country club or a safe place to stand. He had streets, pulpits and a dream so big that even the dogs and fire hoses couldn’t drown it out.
On the other day, you’ve got names. Six million of them, etched on stones, whispered in prayers, and burned into a collective memory that threatens to fade every time someone shrugs and says, “That was so long ago.”
The Liberation Monument in Liberty State Park, Jersey City, portrays and American soldier carrying a survivor of the Holocaust from a Nazi camp toward the end of World War II. (Jersey Journal file photo)Jersey Journal file photo
The Holocaust didn’t just strip people of life, it stripped them of their dignity and their humanity. It reduced them to mere numbers, and if we’re not careful, numbers are easy to forget.
Keep this in mind, these two days in January are not about mourning. Mourning is easy. Mourning is candles and speeches and feeling bad until the next headline rolls along.
These days are about the hard work that has been done, and the even harder work that still needs to be done.
MLK didn’t dream about a world where we’d sit around feeling sorry for him. He wanted action, movement and change. Holocaust survivors didn’t make it out of the camps to hear you say, “Never again,” while you conveniently look the other way when hate, violence and intolerance start brewing in your own backyards.
Dignity is the universal thread that sews these two days together, more specifically, the fight for dignity.
For King, it was dignity in a nation that wrote “all men are created equal” while treating Black men, women and children like second-class citizens, or worse. For Holocaust victims, it was the ultimate fight to hold onto dignity in places where humanity had been deliberately and systematically erased.
And the enemies? They’re not as different as you’d think. They wear different hats, sure. Maybe it’s a white hood in Alabama. Maybe it’s a Nazi uniform in Poland. Maybe it’s a slick suit in a boardroom. Hate doesn’t care what it wears, as long as it gets the job done.
A bench and plaque at the Martin Luther King Drive Light Rail station in Jersey City includes the MLK quote: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.” (Jersey Journal file photo)Jersey Journal file photo
But, let us remember, MLK and the Holocaust taught us that hate can lose. It loses when you march. It loses when you testify. It loses when you teach your children to stand up for someone who’s different, when you don’t let them laugh at the wrong joke or stay quiet at the wrong moment.
So, this January, take a minute. Think about the preacher with the dream and the millions who died in the nightmare. And then ask yourself, what are you doing to make sure the echoes of these days don’t get drowned out? Because history’s not here to be remembered. It’s here to be answered.
John Di Genio and Albert J. Cupo are residents of Jersey City and frequent contributors to The Jersey Journal’s Opinion pages.
Send letters to the editor and guest columns for The Jersey Journal to jjletters@jjournal.com.
