Litho's recommended diary asks Who owns the Holocaust? This diary is my answer, originally drafted as a comment on that diary, and modified a little for posting as a diary.
I am also from Eastern European Jewry, although of the family here the last arrived before WWI. Still, there were many relatives still in Bialystok in the late 1930s and my great grandmother tried desperately to get them out.
A previous significant other had parents from Warsaw who went east to avoid the Nazis, and wound up interned in Siberia, before getting to the US first through Iran (where her brother was born) then Portugal and then New York.
The couple across the street from me escaped just in time. She was from Switzerland, he was from Austria, and they got themselves and their families out in 1939. And there were other Holocaust survivors, including a few from the camps, in the synagogue in which I grew up. But these were things not talked about.
I look at my Jewish background as I can say that it has driven much of my concern for social justice, such as my involvement in Civil Rights in the 1960s, and human rights, such as my opposition to torture, to denial of rights to or demonizing of people as "other." And it is what kept me from becoming a Quaker for many years, because I have always believe in intervention to stop slaughter, regardless of whether or not US national interests are involved.
I would offer one caution. Many Jews do not like the word Holocaust, since in other contexts it has to do with a burnt offering to God. They prefer the Hebrew word Shoah, which of course to many of us brings to mind the film by Claude Lanzmann. And immediately an image pops into my mind, of the aging Polish train engineer who drove trains into Auschwitz, remembering and drawing his finger across his throat to indicate death. People knew. They could not not know. Even if that did not mean they were capable of doing anything about it, which is an entirely separate issue.
Who owns the Holocaust/Shoah? If we do not all, then we have learned nothing. If we confine that term, and Rafael Lemkin's term of genocide, to the attempted extermination of European Jewry, then like too many during that period we will stand by and justify our non-intervention.
Cambodians slaughtering their own. Islamicists claiming that the West is waging war on their religion. Intranecine violence in Ireland, Sri Lanka, Iran (against Bahai's), Iraq, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia/Eritrea, the former Yugoslavia - all involve demonizing of someone as "other" and whether or not the acts rise to the level of genocide does not matter: the world cannot sit idly by and still claim the full measure of humanity. And I might add that our own hands are far from clean: whether it was treatment of Native Americans, the persistent wounds of racism and sexism, the religious discrimination against Catholics and against Mormons and jews, and today the strong strands of homophobia justifying denial of rights and worse, we may not today be slaughtering large numbers of our own who are "different" or "other," but we have in the past - massacres, lynchings, of course - and the willingness to categorize someone as "other" and thus somehow excluded from the social contract is a dangerous first step in the direction of genocide.
Who owns the Holocaust/Shoah? No one and everyone.
Insisting one's hurts are greater than those of others is to diminish the hurts of others, to be too self-centered. We have seen much of that kind of discussion here, too much. People's hurts are real, and should be acknowledged, but they also need not to reduce themselves to their hurts. They are so much more, and should insist on recognition of that as well.
And some are too quick to apply terms too broadly as well. Those include Nazi, Fascist, Holocaust, Genocide, and Rape. Using terms too loosely devalues them, and then what words do we have left for the true horrors that should shock us all to action?
Perhaps it is that I am tired. I am in 62, and for the first time in my life I can say that my health is not good. Perhaps it is that teaching 6 classes a day and trying to make a difference by writing and lobbying is wearing me down.
It is not that I do not care. Certainly anyone who reads my impassioned words would come to a different conclusion.
I thanked litho for the diary - it was thought-provoking, which I think is good. And it opened the door for further discussion, which is even better.
And I decided that my comment was enough in a different direction that I should post it separately, slightly reworked, for those who might be interested in this discussion. If not, so be it.
I offer no answers. Merely my own exhaustion, frustration, yet unwillingness to give up trying to make a difference.
And one way I try to make a difference is to provoke thinking and discussion, by writing. That is why I first wrote this as a comment, and have chosen to post it, slightly modified as a diary.
Peace.