Mixed Message

PRESIDENT REAGAN'S announcement that during his trip to West Germany next month he will visit a German World War II cemetery and forgo a visit to the Dachau concentration camp was particularly outrageous coming as it did last week, the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps. While Reagan's aides are reconsidering the president's widely-attacked travel plans, thousands of ceremonies nationwide will commemorate the end of the nightmare that exterminated, among others, 70 percent of European Jews, and one-third of the world's total Jewish population.

While Reagan's motive is genuine, the "spirit of reconciliation," which he is bending over backwards to demonstrate to the Germans, comes as a slap in the face to all those for whom the events of the 1940s were a living hell. While a visit to a German cemetery is itself a fine gesture to those Germans who suffered in the war, combined with Reagan's decision to avoid the concentration camps, the move becomes a highly insulating one. Concentration camp survivors, families of victims, and World War II veterans rightly condemn Reagan for what appears to be an attempt to bury memories of the irrefutable German past, of the six million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust.

It seems the President has failed to draw the distinction between avoiding dwelling on the past and ignoring it altogether. In trying to avoid sending "the wrong signal" to the Germans, Reagan has managed to send a clear message to the victims of German terror, which includes the implication that it is no longer important to remember their past, that the time has come to stop reviving anguished memories. This is a harsh message for the 5000 concentration camp survivors assembling in Philadelphia this week who will share experiences of camps which daily exterminated up to 10,000 Jews and other Nazi victims, including homosexuals, Catholics and gypsies.

WHEN REAGAN visit's Germany in May he should take with him not only the spirit of friendship, but also the spirit of the Holocaust survivors. He can extend the hand of friendship to West German Chancellor Helmut kohl without renouncing any recognition of the last 45 years of history. Recent reports from Germany show that memories and accounts of the death camps may in fact be fading, particularly for the youngest generation of Germans. And The New York Times reported that at last Saturday's official East German ceremony commemorating the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, there was no mention of the tens of thousands of Jews who were murdered there. A guide book to the museum, the Times report continues, calls the goal of Nazi concentration camps "to put down any resistance to Nazism," and says that "their terror centered on the Communists and militant social democrats who were the hard core of the resistance." What makes this even more frightening is that this is part of a larger trend of faulty revisionist history that threatens to erase or distort the memory of the Holocaust.

Reagan's decision to avoid the subject of the Holocaust next month is particularly troubling in the face of such blatant, dangerous revisionism. As he plans his trip, Reagan should heed the words of writer and camp survivor Elie Weisel, on whom he will bestow the Congressional medal of honor this week. Of his teenage years spent in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Weisel wrote in his autobiographical account, Night, "Never shall I forget these things even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself." While Reagan's plea to "look to the future" is an apt one, it should not be accompanied by an obliteration of the past.