Jeff Jacoby’s“The end of Holocaust remembrance’’ (Ideas, May 1) resonated with me. In my all-girls Catholic high school, we were required to watch films about the liberation of the concentration camps. Our teachers told us we could leave if we really couldn’t handle it, but we were encouraged to stay until the end.

I have found it absurd that anyone would try to deny the Holocaust. It was history, after all. After college, I worked in a small Manhattan ad agency owned by a Jewish man. One of my jobs was to process the mail. This is when I opened correspondence from organizations, to which he contributed, that fought the denials. They contained copies of articles claiming the Holocaust didn’t really happen or was exaggerated. I was shocked. (This was long before the Internet became a much more insidious purveyor of such propaganda.)

Jacoby is correct that in allowing the genocides of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia, we have already forgotten. The truth of the Holocaust is that the ability to hate is within all of us. While most of us could never commit such acts, we can all look away, pretend, and forget. It is imperative that we remember what we are capable of in order at least to limit the chances of repeating it. Jacoby’s opinion piece is exactly that reminder.

Maureen Redmond-Scura

Concord, N.H.