The Power of Empathy

A number of years ago, I visited the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The museum was strangely deserted; the only other visitors my friend and I saw were a young African-American family. Social animals that humans are, the four of us wandered the museum near to each other, although we never spoke. After about an hour, we came to the Hall of Testimony in the Holocaust Exhibit, where video monitors show survivors recounting the horrors they witnessed and suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The family spent a long time in the Hall, listening to the stories for nearly 45 minutes. I was touched to see how visibly moved the mother and father were — and then I noticed that tears were streaming down the face of their son, who couldn’t have been older than 10. Watching him cry so openly at the plight of my people (and of the gypsies, the gays and lesbians, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled…) was one of the most profoundly moving — and hopeful — experiences of my life. Just thinking about that young boy today, nearly a decade later, still makes me emotional.

I offer this personal anecdote tonight, on Christmas Eve in New Zealand, because of this wonderful story about a group of Muslim leaders who recently gathered at the Holocaust Museum to remember and commemorate the persecution of the Jews (video is available here):

American Muslims “believe we have to learn the lessons of history and commit ourselves: Never again,” said Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, standing before the eternal flame flickering from a black marble base that holds dirt from Nazi concentration camps.

Around the hexagonal room, candles glimmered under the engraved names of the death camps: Chelmno. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Majdanek.

“We stand here with three survivors of the Holocaust and my great Muslim friends to condemn this outrage in Iran,” said Sara J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director, addressing a bank of TV cameras in the room, known as the Hall of Remembrance.

The museum, she noted, holds “millions of pieces of evidence of this crime.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad organized last week’s conference after Western countries protested his comment last year that the slaughter of 6 million Jews was a myth. The two-day meeting drew historical revisionists and such people as David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Major American Muslim and Arab-American organizations have condemned the Iran conference. The Muslim speakers at yesterday’s ceremony did not mention that event but called for recognition of the suffering Jews experienced in the Holocaust and condemned religious hatred. Asked afterward why they did not single out Iran, the Muslim leaders said the problem was broader than the recent conference.

“The issue here is: There might be somebody from X and Y country, a Muslim, saying the same thing,” Magid said. If anyone wants to make Holocaust denial an Islamic cause, he said, “we want to say to them: You cannot use our name.”

Museum officials said a Muslim delegation had never before made such a public statement at the memorial building.

After the speeches yesterday, Bloomfield invited the visitors to light candles to remember the Holocaust victims and Muslims who rescued some of the besieged Jews. One by one, the guests silently shuffled along the wallside bank of candles: the tall imam in his round Muslim cap, known as a kufi; a woman in a Muslim head scarf; Muslim men in business suits; and three elderly women in pantsuits from the D.C. suburbs, survivors of the genocide.

One of them, Johanna Neumann, recounted at the ceremony how Muslims saved her Jewish family. Members of her family had fled from Germany to Albania, where Muslim families sheltered them and hid their identity during the Nazi occupation.

“Everybody knew who we were. Nobody would even have thought of denouncing us” to the Nazis, said the tiny 76-year-old Silver Spring resident. “These people deserve every respect anybody can give them.”

I don’t know where that young boy is today, but I’m confident that he would have lit a candle with the Jews and the Muslims at the ceremony. That’s the power of empathy: once experienced, it can never be forgotten or destroyed.

To all my co-bloggers and beloved readers: Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Happy Kwanzaa. Have a wonderful holiday season!