It can feel at times like World War II and Hitler and the Holocaust all happened in a distant and almost unreal past.

Partly that's because it happened on the other side of the color film line. But we are still living in Hitler's time,

and I don't mean in the sense that some new trend in fascism reminds us of the Nazis,

I mean there are countless people still alive in their 80s and 90s who met Hitler

who shook his hand.

Gunterschvagerman was in the Fjurr bunker and walked with gerbils and his wife up the stairs after they killed all their kids and there's some confusion as to whether he's not still alive as of this recording.

He's 105 if that's the case and he isn't dead in a barrel somewhere, but living

memory still encompasses Hitler in the Holocaust. You and I are potentially only one degree

of separation from that handshake.

The Holocaust has been through a lot since the end of the war.

It took a long while for the world at large to truly acknowledge it but once it sank in

once its scale and scope became widely known it was an irresistible muse for

writers and artists and politicians and polemicists.

The incomprehensible but fully comprehensible mechanization of death

in a setting resembling a factory-making bathroom

tile was a topic of study that was too pungent to just take at face value, too ripe

not to be appropriated, but thankfully, until recently, too grotesque

to use openly as a metaphor.

That is, until Vulgarity became our only shared language, and the dumbest tweeters among us began equating the mundane with the infamous.

Back in 1999, the war was only over 54 years prior.

The world then was full of veterans in their early 70s,

the same age boomers are now.

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