This is an important reminder.  I think the hard part about the Holocaust for a lot of people is that the meanings we can use to make it more bearable can, sometimes, make the experience sublime or (tragically)  beautiful and, in some way, less real.  It’s a complicated problem:

Speaking of the Holocaust is never easy-except for those who blithely deny it-but at times Catholics seem to find it easier to speak of the unspeakable in terms that make clear that we, too, know about suffering. We believe we know which words to invoke at the scene of faith-challenging atrocities because feeling forsaken by God is part of the story of our faith as well. The difficult thing to accept, however, is that nothing shows how little we understand the suffering of others more than the attempt to use our story to make sense of it.

It’s likely the Catholic Church will find itself again where it is now-seeming still unable to comprehend the enormity of the Shoah-until it realizes that no matter the religion into which its savior was born, the Holocaust is not part of its narrative of salvation. Even allowing that those who hold a universal faith must seek opportunities for salvation everywhere, it does little good to treat Auschwitz as another stage in an endless Passion Play. To do so subjects brutal realities to the theological imagination, where meaning holds sway over facts.