In a haunting monologue from The Twilight Zone episode “Death’s-Head Revisited,” Rod Serling wrote:
"All the Dachaus must remain standing.
"The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers." ~ Rod Serling, from "Death's Head Revisited" (1961)That warning from 1961 still echoes today — maybe more urgently than ever.
We don’t hide the horrors of our history—because doing so risks repeating them. The generations who survived the worst—World War II, the Holocaust, slavery—came away with a solemn vow: never again. But that promise is only as strong as our memory is honest.
Yet in America today, we’re watching that memory be erased. We're seeing political efforts—often on the right—to whitewash slavery, to strip it from our curricula, to soften the brutal truth of what we did to human beings for hundreds of years. All so we can pretend it wasn’t so bad. That maybe we weren’t that cruel. That maybe it’s time to “move on.”
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But history doesn’t move on. It waits.
If we forget, if we sanitize the past to protect our feelings or preserve a myth of national innocence, we risk one day seeing the return of horrors we thought buried. Authoritarianism. Nazism. The machinery of death, gas chambers and all. Or worse—something we can’t yet imagine, just as generations once couldn’t imagine those gas chambers until it was too late.
Germany, unlike us, faced its demons head-on. They didn’t tear down the reminders of their national shame. They preserved them. Taught them. Embedded them into daily life—not to wallow, but to remember. To vaccinate future generations against complicity and denial. Memorials dot the cities. Schoolchildren learn about the Holocaust in depth. Confronting the past is part of being German. That’s what maturity looks like in a democracy.
In contrast, America is regressing. When we ban books that teach our children the truth, or rebrand slavery as “involuntary relocation,” we’re not just failing our history—we’re dooming our future.
We must not become the grave diggers Serling warned us about.
The Dachaus must remain standing.
And so must the truth.
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