Never again?

After walking into the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, visitors pick up an identification card based on gender.
Each card gives a brief history of a real person who lived during the Holocaust.
I was Bruna Sevini, born Sept. 22, 1923, in Trieste, Italy. My son was Max Rosenblat, born July 1939 in Radom, Poland.
Riding up in the elevator to the fourth flour of the museum to start the tour, we discovered how our assumed lives played out.
While awaiting deportation to Germany, Bruna was in a prison in 1944 when it was hit by an air raid. She and others escaped to a convent, where they were liberated by British troops on Sept. 23, 1944, the day after her 21st birthday.
Max was three-years-old in August 1942, when the Germans rounded up all the Jews in the Radom ghetto where he lived with his parents. Max and his mother were herded into a railroad boxcar and taken to the Treblinka extermination camp. The pair were gassed upon arrival.
Reading our fates gave only a slight hint of the unimaginable hell that was about to unfold before us.
From top to bottom, each floor took us through the sequence of Hitler's rise to power, the rounding up and extinction of Jews, Gypsies and other non-Ayrians, the world's slow reaction to the horror, and finally, thankfully, Hitler's downfall and the liberation of those left.
Throughout the exhibit, photos and artifacts chronicled one of the bleakest moments in world history.
There were piles of musty, leather shoes taken from prisoners as they arrived at concentration camps. There was a table, upon which dead prisoners were laid and the gold from their teeth extracted. There was a boxcar used for transporting men, women and children to their death. There were crude, wooden bunkbeds, where prisoners slept five and six to a bed.
The misery of the Holocaust journey played out in every step, on every wall, in every room.
We left the museum through an exhibit on Darfur, where an estimated 3 million people have been displaced and more than 200,000 killed since 2003 in a scorched earth campaign of murder, torture and rape of civilians. Some reports put the numbers even higher.
And so, here we are, in 2009, only 65 years after the Allied troops liberated concentration camp victims.
Never again? Hardly. Think Bosnia and Serbia. Think Rwanda. Now Darfur.
The first link below will send a postcard to President Obama, urging him to abide by his campaign promise to stop the genocide in Darfur.
The second is a petition to the UN secretary general, asking him to take several key steps to ending the atrocities against the people of Darfur and the devastation of their country.
http://addyourvoice.org/?utm_campaign=Postcard&utm_source=savedarfur.org&utm_medium=textlink
http://action.savedarfur.org/campaign/savedarfurcoalition