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| Elie Wiesel nel campo di concentramento di Buchenwald il 16 aprile 1945; è nella seconda fila, la settima persona da sinistra |
Non lo spaventava la morte, ma l'oblio dello sterminio quando anche l'ultimo dei sopravissuti sarà morto.
Condivido il suo timore che, in un prossimo futuro, possano avere la meglio i "negazionisti".
Già una generazione come la mia di nati nel dopoguerra, quando tutto era finito, ci si dava un gran daffare per dimenticare e gli insegnanti, molti dei quali fascisti transitati alla Democrazia Cristiana, ben si guardavano dall'informare su quanto era appena accaduto, ha dovuto attendere la fine degli anni sessanta per prendere coscienza dell'accaduto.
Comunque altro urgeva e per un adolescente quello era ormai il passato. Figurarsi per i giovani odierni! Come fargliene una colpa?
Che fare per non dimenticare? La scuola, funzione educante della società, dovrebbe essere la risposta.
Scriveva John Dewey in DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION:
"Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.
If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. The young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!
Forse, al posto di indigesti sproloqui, basterebbero fotografie al posto di tanti inutili crocifissi a stimolare curiosità e domande sui lager o anche su eventi contemporanei. Forse.
