“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”
It’s pretty obvious from their contemporary portrayal in movies like The Great Dictator, that most of Europe and the rest of the world didn’t realize how bad concentration camps were. When we did find out, most of the people who heard the descriptions or, even worse, saw the camps themselves, wanted to forget that such a thing ever happened. Even now, one of the things that most aids Holocaust deniers is that the camps were literally nearly unbelievably cruel. It’s so uncomfortable to bring up, some people just want to avoid the subject altogether. Rod Serling was not one of those people.
Oh, yes, just funny walks. That’s all.
Serling clearly had a mad-on for intolerance in general, and for Hitler and Nazism in particular. He often wrote episodes that depict horrifying ends for people who judge based on race, as well as any who would sympathize with the…
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The Joker On The Sofa 