Lessons of the Holocaust.

• Author: Hier, Marvin

A FEW YEARS AGO, a Holocaust survivor in Los Angeles told me that he took exception to the recent trend of remembrances where the centerpiece focuses on heroic individuals such as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued scores of Jews from certain death. His point was not that they are undeserving of eternal gratitude and honor, for they surely are. His fear, however, was that young people might come to accept the notion that the relatively few practitioners of righteous conduct were the dominant characters of the Holocaust.

In April, 1995, survivors and world leaders gathered at Auschwitz to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Undoubtedly, for most of the participants who personally experienced the horrors of Hitler's Third Reich, this will have been their last gathering. Future anniversaries now will pass to the next generation for observation.

What kind of memory will they inherit? Will it be one reduced to a sound byte? Or will they have a deeper understanding of the machinery that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust?

Will it include Hitler's early writings in Mein Kampf, explaining what would happen to the Jews if he took power? Will they remember his use of the legal system that invoked the Nuremberg laws. barring Jews from German society? Or will they know of the infamous Concordat, which the Vatican signed with Hitler's Third Reich in 1933, granting the Nazis prestige and making it acceptable for the world to flock to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics?

What about the 1938 Evian conference, where international delegates refused to open their doors to the desperate refugees? As the Australian delegate put it, "We don't have a racial problem and don't want to import one."

As for the Wannsee Conference of 1942, will they be aware that 11 different branches of the German government were represented at that meeting to finalize the plan to exterminate an entire people with poisonous gas, thereby endowing mankind with the diabolical legacy of Auschwitz and Majdanek?

Or, will the next generation's view of the Holocaust be reduced to a brief discussion in a classroom about an important book or film, where, inevitably, the few heroes manage to rise above the evil around them and stand up for human dignity? If that is all future students come away with, then I'm afraid my friend's fear is quite justifiable.

In the end, if remembrance is limited to the courage of a Schindler or a Wallenberg...