The uses of the Holocaust.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: Column

It is the photograph that has come to symbolize the Holocaust: a small Jewish boy, frightened eyes downcast, hands raised above his shoulders, surrounded by Nazi troops. This is the final roundup of Jews scheduled for execution during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. More Jews, hands raised, can be seen in the background. We know as we stare at the photo that soon they will all be dead.

The photo appears in archives and exhibitions, in magazine and newspaper articles about the Holocaust, in television documentaries and history books. By now I must have seen it hundreds of times, and each time my reaction is what it was when I first saw it almost half a century ago: It could have been me.

That boy and I were about the same age fifty years ago, and if he had lived we would be about the same age now. Only happenstance kept me from being there in his place. My parents were Polish Jews who migrated to Vienna, where I was born. Their parents and most of their brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews--my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins--were among the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

Once again this spring the inexpressibly sad photo of the frightened child has forced itself on our consciousness. It was widely published in connection with stories about the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It illustrated articles about the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto. And it was put to other uses, as well.

A few Sundays ago, the Warsaw photo appeared on the front page of The New York Times week-in-review section along-side another picture--one of a Serb soldier executing a dying man during the fighting in Bosnia. The two photos were linked by a caption headed ECHOES OF BUTCHERY. The headline over the story accompanying the photos asked, DOES THE WORLD STILL RECOGNIZE A HOLOCAUST? The article quoted the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher: "I never thought I'd see another holocaust in my life."

When I spoke on national television in opposition to U.S. military intervention in the Balkans, I received outraged calls and letters from viewers who accused me of forgetting the Holocaust. The Progressive, too, has been denounced for failing to recognize a direct analogy between what the Nazis did to the Jews and what the Bosnian Serbs are doing to their Muslim compatriots.

Eli Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winner who has spent his life trying to compel humanity to confront the...