As I observed Holocaust Remembrance Day this past Tuesday, I thought back to a little over a year ago when I was in Poland, standing over the ash pits of Auschwitz. I only spent a week in the country, but that was enough to feel nearly crushed by the weight of history. I had hoped that the trip would provide some clarity to the atrocity, help me wrap my mind around the number six million, help me comprehend how something like this could have happened.

What I quickly came to discover, though, was that rather than getting answered, my questions only became more deeply felt. As I peered into the room where the SS man stood to watch and make sure the gas was killing correctly, I was literally floored by the idea that this had been a human being, by the concrete evidence of a person doing this to other people as his normal job, daily, constantly, watching through a window amidst the screams to make sure people died. I wondered, and haven’t stopped wondering since, what the man who did this was like in the rest of his life. I wonder if he was a dedicated father, if he was good to his wife, if he never cheated on his taxes.

When I gathered the strength to stand up and exit the gas chambers, the view of the bright yellow apartment buildings across the street knocked me down all over again. How could these people live with a reminder of the genocide their country allowed every time they stepped out onto their patios? How could people live in this suffocating history? And, the question I found hardest to answer, how could people have let this happen and how could they live with themselves afterward?

A few days later, I met with Polish teens and I asked about the apartments.

“Where else are they supposed to go?” they asked me. “Everywhere is tainted.”

As I talked more to these teenagers and listened to the stories about one grandfather who was a soldier and another grandfather who had to flee, I began to realize what should have been obvious — non-Jewish Poles were in a war. They also suffered; they had concerns of their own, as did people everywhere. In my mind, this does not excuse or adequately explain civilian and international inaction against the horrors of the Holocaust, but it does help me to comprehend it a little better. There were certainly people who purposely allowed the Jews in their midst to be slaughtered, there were people who remained inactive out of fear, but I think that many people, in Europe and across the world, allowed it to happen because they simply were not paying enough attention.

Like the Americans of World War II, we are living in troubled times (are any times not troubled?). We are pouring money and lives into a war many of us do not believe in; Hurricane Katrina ushered in a humanitarian disaster on our own soil; we worry about immigration, marriage, abortion, the hate-mongering of politics. Our own pain is real and I don’t want to dismiss the value of dealing with it. However, it is still not excusable to allow our concerns to blind us to the responsibility to stop the genocide that is happening in our midst.

A government-sponsored genocide is raging in Darfur, Sudan and we are allowing it to happen. Two and a half million innocent people have been forced out of their homes and 400,000 have been killed. Since early 2004, the Sudanese government has been working together with a militia force called the Janjaweed to decimate villages in the Darfur region. It is now 2006, and the genocide is still raging. The longer we wait, the more the situation degenerates.

There are things that we as individuals can do. First, we can use sources such as www.savedarfur.org and www.standnow.org to educate ourselves about the conflict. Next, we can write letters to our congress-people asking them to take more solid action in Sudan. Right now, we are trying to make sure that the U.S. Senate earmarks at least $173 million in the 2006 Emergency Supplemental Funding Request. We can write to them every week, or every day. Our elected officials have started to listen, and we need to keep pushing.

Lately, I have been thinking about a poem called “Birdsong,” written by a child in the Holocaust ghetto Terezenstadt:

“The poor thing stands there vainly.
Vainly, he strains his voice.
Perhaps he’ll die.
Then can you say,
‘How beautiful is the world today?’”

It is our responsibility to listen. We must not excuse our inaction with thoughts of our own problems. We have to find a way to dedicate resources toward stopping the atrocities. The first step is to start paying attention.