Between Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day and Independence Day, I left Jerusalem for a five-day visit to Berlin. In 1936, my mother was sent away from her home in Schoneberg, the section of the city where John F. Kennedy decades later stood on the porch of the Town Hall and declared, "I am a Berliner." I remember my father, a big Kennedy fan, articulating what turned out to be a leitmotif of ambivalence in my life: How could Kennedy declare, only 18 years after the Holocaust, that he was a Berliner?

In 1939, my grandparents fled on Kristallnacht, bribing their way onto a train to Switzerland. Last Thursday I ascertained for certain that the substantial assets they left behind were not recoverable. The statute of limitations ran out in 1955 and my mother never really wanted to deal with the Germans. As I left the office of the very nice lawyer who so advised me, I felt a sense of closure. Sitting in the sun at a sidewalk cafe, I felt strangely at home.

But when I wandered by the Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate a few days later, I was troubled by the site of young children using the monument as a playground, people sitting down for a smoke, couples flirting while sitting on the blocks that make up the memorial, while others sipped beer and ate ice cream across the street in full view of the memorial.

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According to the pamphlets given out at the site, the 200 or so blocks that make up the architecture of the memorial are not intended as symbolism. But I couldn't help thinking of them as representing all the communities wiped out by the Germans.

There was that ambivalence. Of course, life has to go on. Germans have to make some statement about the Holocaust, but they also have to go on living, and I even like Berlin. On a bright April Saturday, Berliners and tourists walk about, enjoying the good fortune of their recently reunited country, reveling in their history, their culture and the dynamism of their city. "Oh, and here's the Holocaust Memorial," you can imagine a host pointing out to his guests. "We, as a nation, did some really awful things in the past, but now we have created monuments to memorialize them, and life goes on."

Germans sit on the Holocaust.

Having this experience immediately on the heels of Holocaust Memorial Day made me want to scream. When I blurted out to one German colleague that the Jewish Museum in Berlin makes me feel that Hitler succeeded in his goal of turning the Jews into a museum item, she became livid at my cynicism. I wasn't taken aback, though, because it's the same reaction I get in Jerusalem when I say that we have turned the Holocaust into an industry and a political tool. It's the same reaction I get when I tell visiting Americans that they should live in Israel and not visit it as a museum and a Holocaust memorial. It's the typical reaction to questions like: Why do we drag all foreign dignitaries to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, whether they ask to go or not? Why do we imply that Israel exists because of the Holocaust? Why do we insist that the Holocaust was "unique"? Apparently we need to do these things so that our lives can go on.

Jews and Israelis sit on the Holocaust.

Observing this, it is not surprising that Iran's Ahmadinejad peddles the notion to his citizens that the final solution to their problems lies in de-bunking the Final Solution of Hitler. It was all a hoax, he actually thinks, to justify the creation of Israel and the consequent injustice to the Palestinians and the intrusion of Jewish Israel in the otherwise purely Muslim Middle East. If I can reveal the deception, I can hear him calculating, then we will be rid of Israel, the injustice will be corrected and life will go on.

Iran sits on the Holocaust.

Germans should go on with their lives, but should not sit on their Holocaust memorials. Israelis should remember the Holocaust forever, whatever the rest of the world wants to do. But Israelis and Jews should prove that Israel does not need the Holocaust as justification for its existence. Israeli Jews should see Israel as the expression of their right of self-determination, and more North American Jews should live in, and not just visit, Israel.

I suppose that when Germans and Jews stop sitting on the Holocaust, so will Iran.

The author moved to Israel from the United States in 1981 and is a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health of the Hebrew University Hadassah Faculty of Medicine in Jerusalem.