There is a new and growing, self-identifying privilege, seeking to be added to the American Bill of Rights: victimhood. Black victims beget white victims, religious victims beget christian victims, female victims beget male victims, rich victims beget poor victims… everyone is a victim, everyone is entitled to be a victim. With the malaise of victimhood comes sorrow, regret and the joy of depression. It seems the world is running out of victimizers. Human history is laden with victims, especially mass victims. Of all the genocides in that continuing history, none comes close to the Nazi holocaust, its murderous cruelty, its dispassionate savagery, its capitalistic industrializing of atrocity in plain, broad daylight. What the Nazi victimizing provoked was the latent and not so latent anti-semitic fury in the countries it occupied: in Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Greece, Italy, Austria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, France, Spain, et al, and of course, Germany itself... nearly the whole of Europe. Nazi occupiers were often astonished and humorously pleased with the savagery and fury that occupied populations rendered upon their Jewish fellow-citizens. The Nazi victimizers found it reassuring. The fact that America closed its doors to Jewish victims, escaping the Holocaust, condemning thousands to the Nazi horror, is also a latent and not so latent unforgivable stain in its history. Ken Burns' current series "The U.S. and the Holocaust" is a testament to an ugly face of the American Dream. But the picture he so powerfully paints struggles to wrap itself around the 12-year nightmare and its aftermath. No one has been able to completely encapsulate that horror. The scope and unrestrained spread of it is too vast, unimaginable, unbelievable. Among the sharpest points that Burns makes in his documentary, one is salient: as they planned their "Final Solution", the Nazis studied America closely, its racist and slavery history, its segregation structure, its Jim Crow laws. They learned and adapted what they learned. And they heralded its heroes, especially the shining knight of the day: Charles Lindberg. It happened 77 years ago. It happened yesterday. In 1958, I met Zev Weiss… a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz death canp. He was a medical school graduate who was forced to participate in the malevolence called ''medical research" throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. When he finally withered under the unrelenting nightmare, he was sent to be exterminated. I met him in Rochester, New York where he worked as a proofreader for a book publisher. He lived alone and apparently had no friends or family. We had a mutual fascination with the music of Ravel and impressionist painting. We became friends. He rarely talked about his war experiences and then only haltingly and briefly. One day, he called me over to his apartment. He showed me a notice about the death of a friend whom he thought had not survived as he did. It was the first time I had ever seen tears in his eyes. He said to me: "I know you think that I am sad and depressed, sullen. I am, but not because of what happened to me during the war, but what didn't happen after the war." Then the tears stopped. He told me that during the last months of the war when he tried to leave the country, he was shipped back to Auschwitz. When the soldiers came and opened the camp, he was starving and sick but obsessed with finding a newspaper, any current newspaper. He told me he desperately needed to read about what was happening outside. He told me he finally found a soldier who had a newspaper that was only a few days old. He told me he fell to the ground and began to scour the pages for news of a world congress which he believed was meeting. He believed that everyone was in their home glued to their radios. The buses had stopped running, the elevators, everyone was listening to the congress, listening to hear it say: We're at the end, we've crossed the line, we're at the bottom, everything must change, this can never happen again. Of course, he found nothing, there was no congress, people were not listening to anything. They were going about their business, salvaging their lives, trying to forget. This stuck in his mind, in his sensibility like the wound of a broken arrow. It would never heal. It defined and condemned the dignity of the human species. In 1972, Zev Weiss ended his life. He left no note, just a few scrawled words on the bathroom mirror: "Never Again Is Forever"