Sadly, there are some people who believe the answer matters. But they miss the point--that education about human rights abuses, no matter who is the victim, has the potential to help humanity avoid falling into the same trap in the future.

Into this group falls German Canadian Congress president Tony Bergmeier. He recently complained publicly because the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) will include a permanent Holocaust exhibit. His reason? According to media reports, it shouldn't get a dedicated space "if no one else has one ... the Holocaust by now has been well publicized. Everyone knows what happened there." In other words, been there, done that. No need to think about it anymore.

The CMHR undertook an exhaustive cross-country consultation process during which all interested parties could make their case for inclusion in the museum. It then made the appropriate decision to give the Holocaust the space it rightly deserves.

Let's be clear: no one is suggesting other genocide victims suffered less than the Jews did under the Nazis. It's not a competition, and there are no winners. To compare tragedies is counter-productive to the purpose at hand: teaching Canadians about the dangers of hatred and the need to confront evil. But to suggest the Holocaust was just like any other genocide, undeserving of special recognition, is to ignore the reality of its impact on 20th-century society, and on Canada in particular.

The Holocaust was a turning point in human history. Unprecedented in scope, it changed how people understood the depths of evil to which human beings could sink, challenged modern civilization's moral centre, and forced us to accept that the slippery slope to unparalleled depravity is not so easily avoided.

The Holocaust was the first time the world witnessed such a deeply calculated, bureaucratic and highly mechanized approach to state-sponsored genocide. Murder became an industry whose bottom line was the extinction of a particular group of people. It is the defining example of the complete and utter annihilation of human rights.

The Holocaust embedded the concept of genocide into the world's collective conscience. From its ashes rose the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Genocide--the foundation of contemporary human rights advocacy. All subsequent international human rights developments must be viewed through this lens. The CMHR understands this irrefutable link.

Equally important is the Holocaust's impact on Canadian society. Lester B. Pearson was a key player in the creation of the United Nations, and there is a direct link between post-Holocaust international human rights initiatives and Canadian human rights structures. Equality, elimination of racism and discrimination, respect for diversity, and minority community rights protection have become enshrined in Canadian legal structures. Not surprisingly, many Canadian Holocaust survivors were among the creators of our federal and provincial human rights codes, anti-hate legislation and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Holocaust has also fostered a culture of openness and outreach among the myriad of cultural, faith and ethnic groups that are such a rich element of Canadian society, the German Canadian Congress's views on the CMHR notwithstanding.

It is ironic that, among all Canadian communities affected by genocides, the German Canadian Congress objects to dedicated space for the Holocaust in the CMHR. One would think the burden of history would be enough to preclude such short-sighted thinking on this issue.

Some events in world history are uniquely transformative--not just for those directly involved, but for everyone, and everything, that follows. The Holocaust was one such event, and it teaches us that evil has a way of lurking in places where we least expect it. More's the pity that the German Canadian Congress should publicly deny this universal lesson.

-Wendy Lampert is the national director of Community Relations of Canadian Jewish Congress.