Lots of people saw my father walking through the frozen streets of Budapest in the winter of 1944. A 13-year-old boy wearing a coat with a hole at the elbow marching in a death convey towards the Danube River. Lots of people knew how it would end, they knew that someone would stand him on the riverbank and shoot him in the back. It didn't happen to him in the end. He was saved by a miracle. But it wasn't because of one of the many people who saw him. They didn't intervene.
Lots of people heard the screams from the Mauthausen concentration camp where my grandfather was murdered. When I visited, an embarrassed manager translated a letter for me that had been sent to the commander of the camp by one of the neighbors from a nearby village: "The screams of the dying during the night are disturbing our sleep," she complained. "I'd ask that you move them to the other side of the camp."
Lots of people, including us, tried to explain to my grandmother what happened during the war. My beautiful grandmother couldn't understand it until the day she died. She couldn't understand how cultured people murdered her smart and quiet husband. Why they tried to murder her children. She didn't understand how of all the people in the world, only one, a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg bothered to save her.
Today is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The world needs to never forget its silence. The fact that the world saw and remained silence. They knew. There is no way not to know that millions of people are being murdered. You can smell the death in the air, it hangs in the air. They heard the boots marching up the stairs. They noticed that the apartment next to them was suddenly empty. There is only one explanation for the fact they didn't see – they didn't want to see.