Tuesday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It has been more than 60 years since the last of the Nazi Concentration Camps — in which over 11 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Slavs, and other perceived undesirable individuals were murdered — were liberated.

What does this day mean for us? Living so far removed and hearing every year about the tragedies, what are the lessons we can still gain from such horrible actions?

The thing that fascinates people most was the willingness of everyday people to buy into an ideology such as fascism.

It was not by force that Hitler came to power — the attempted coup d’etat in 1923 failed — but by democratic means. German citizens, everyday individuals, voted for the Nazi party, willingly.

The dangers of extremist ideologies have been firmly established in our culture. However, focusing on the obvious danger of an extremist ideology that bore the camps, people risk losing sight of the smaller examples of hatred and intolerance — they miss seeing the trees for the forest.

It was the smaller, quieter instances of intolerance that allowed Hitler to rise to power. He used the overall demoralization of Germany after World War I as a ruse, to exasperate underlying prejudices.

Luckily in America, the wider culture has moved away from the institutionalized hatred of a minority population. Look how far we have come from Jim Crow Laws.

This does not mean that Americans have moved completely to accept diverse cultures or religions. Maybe we never will.

Yet, we still can hope to recognize the simple truth of our own prejudices.
It takes little strength to hate, but an enormous amount of strength to not hate, to look beyond our hate.

We surrender to our prejudices because we are tired, and our hasty generalizations do not require us to expend energy. We make assumptions about people because of their skin color, their religion, their sexual orientation, because those assumptions are quick and easy and do not require much effort or examination to try and understand our similarities.

The road to extremism is made up of small examples of intolerance that we feel but are at a loss to justify.