Holocaust is a word that comes from Latin and Greek meaning "whole" and burnt" but has taken on a completely new meaning due to the events that occurred in 1930s Europe and the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. There's actually no Chinese equivalent word for it, where the word assigned to "holocaust" is more of a generic genocide or slaughter, literally "big slaughter" but also used in events like the Rape of Nanking of 1939. I learned that this was the word after asking my mom about it (like a little kid asking his mother, "what's so-and-so big word mean and how do I say it in Chinese?") except this was a 36-year-old grown man asking his elderly mother. I realized by my mother's reaction of the Holocaust that Asian might have a different concept of the Holocaust and that the Holocaust might mean different things to different people. My mom once refused to go into the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. (free to the public with a $1 transaction fee and donations accepted) because she was afraid it would be too bloody and grotesque and that she couldn't bear the sight of it. I'd agree that it is rather grotesque in the displaying the nature of evil that human beings could get down to, but it's not an off-putting museum and doesn't show any blood; it's more of a black-and-white depiction of old pictures of the Holocaust, but it's even more powerful than scenes of carnage or blood; the depiction of mass graves and people starving in camps is offputting enough, and also I think they want to allow kids in to learn about the history.
Reallyt he holocaust just shows that any type of people can be evil; there are just evil people in the world. Luckily there are (so far) more good people than evil in the world, but we have to try damn hard to preseve the goodness in the world to resist the evil forces, but not sure if humankind can ultimately turn back our basic instincts of distrust and self-preservation and for some people, just pure cruelty. How does one have enough evil inside him or her to torture another human being? Maybe if you need to do so to protect your family or save a building with 100 people from a ticking time bomb, but the Nazis apparently just did it because of their belief of a superior race and the inferiority of Jews. If I were asked to torture I would like to think I'd refuse and fail to do so just because of my consideration for other human beings, but would I do it if I knew if I didn't do it, then someone else would do it to me?
Some of the pictures just showed some emaciated near-corpse human beings that showed the depravity of concentration camps. One really disturbing story I read about the Holocaust was that even as the Allies and Soviet troops liberated the concentration camps that Jews and other prisoners were enslaved at, there were still many people who died even after the Germans ceded control because they had been so diseased and malnourished at the camps. The conditions were so bad that they never recovered, or when they tried to eat food they ate too much and too quickly that their stomachs couldn't adjust and they died of internal diseases. Such a cruel way to die: first to be deprived of food to the verge of starvation (I can imagine that's a really painful way to die, to die of hunger or more likely thirst because just the insanity that there is food and nourishment available, someone is just depriving it from you) but then also on the other end depriving even after freedom has been granted.
Famous writer Elie Wiesel had several appropriate quotes from the Holocaust, as he himself was a survivor of Auschwitz, but most memorable "opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." Very true. As it's 2024 and very few Holocaust survivors are still living, we have to strive to not be indifferent, maybe create a better word in Chinese for Holocaust to emphasize the hopefully once-in-the-history-of the-world event it was, and focus on the big things like preventing evil and preventing holocausts, not just arguing over social media and getting upset that someone cut me off in traffic (although yea that is annoying).
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