Northwestern community members commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day with three different events Thursday afternoon, closing the day with the presentation of SESP Prof. Danny M. Cohen’s new book “Train,” which follows six teenagers of different backgrounds during the Holocaust.
Homosexuals, Roma and people with disabilities were also targets of the Nazis during World War II, but these groups are sometimes missing or misrepresented in Holocaust history, Cohen said.
Cohen recalled that during the first International Holocaust Remembrance Day, celebrated in Poland in 2005, members of the LGBT community weren’t allowed to participate in the commemorative ceremonies, even though LGBT people had also been targeted by Nazis. That experience made him realize that he didn’t know much about the perspective of other groups victimized by the Holocaust.
“I’m Jewish. I grew up Jewish. I was trained as a Jewish educator and so my understanding of Holocaust history was pretty good,” he said. “But I’m also gay, and I realized at this moment that I didn’t have a very good understanding … of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. And I came to ask the question, why is it that I don’t know this part of history? And, why is it that Polish authorities so easily can exclude this whole group in 2005?”