In an ironic and bitter coincidence, Hitler’s birthday and the start of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, fall on the same day. Technically they overlap. Hitler’s birthday is April 20 and Yom Hashoah begins tonight, which is the beginning of a new day according to the Jewish tradition in which days run from sundown to sundown. But that really is just a technicality.
The truth is that the world over, announcements for memorial events like the one at which I am speaking tonight in Louisville, KY invite people to join together on the 20th. The irony is pretty clear — today being both the 120th anniversary of the birth of the man who sought the total annihilation of the Jewish people and the day upon which we prove his failure by gathering publicly and remembering what he tried to accomplish.
The bitterness of today’s coincidence lies in the fact that even though Hitler didn’t win, it’s hard to speak of either the Jewish people or the human race “winning”.

Of course, the Allies won the war and the slaughter did finally end. But with over six million Jews gassed and burned, and millions more innocent civilians meeting similar fates at the hands of the Nazis, it would be weird to declare that we “won”.
We won the right to end that particular genocide, but in human terms, we all lost and lost big. In fact, we continue to lose given that genocide has threatened communities around the world in virtually every decade since the forties.
No, I am not arguing for the equality of any two genocides. In fact, no two are the same. But I am pretty certain that we ought not to feel genuinely victorious in the fight against any single genocide, when others threaten to continue similar atrocities in new locations.
Perhaps being stuck with our memories of Hitler, with the seeming impossibility of focusing exclusively on those he wanted to destroy and the suffering he caused, we are forced to wrestle with the fact that our victory can never be complete until we can assure ourselves that not only will we never forget the past, but that we can assure that no echoes of it will occur in the future. Perhaps that’s the only way to forget about both Hitler and his birthday.