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I’m told that history repeats itself. When I was 9 years old my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, visited my elementary school. He showed my classmates a photo of himself taken after his liberation from the Dachau concentration camp – he weighed barely 90 pounds and had lost his wife and son.

In my mind, this was history: human, painful and entirely unforgettable. Years later, when I learned of the tragedies in Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor and most recently Sudan, I realized the depth of this repetition. So I was astonished to discover last week that the European Union is considering following Germany’s lead to ban all Nazi symbols.

This approach is a dramatically misguided one. European Union leaders cite the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as well as rising anti-Semitism throughout Europe as their source of inspiration. But the legacy of the Holocaust cannot just be erased. It must persist, unabated, for international challenge and memory.

There’s been an uneasy, albeit complicated, relationship between Europe and the Holocaust for over half a century now. The truth is that most nations don’t know how to deal with the tragedy’s total of almost 11 million innocent victims. Controversies abound, whether they regard reparations, grave sites or Swiss bank accounts.

This week, however, Europe has no choice but to confront a bloody history. The bittersweet 60th anniversary looms heavy over the continent.

Truth be told, “the Europeans are very touchy about letting people say whatever they want precisely because they know what it has led to in the past,” wrote history Professor Peter Baldwin in an e-mail.

But the biggest question Baldwin proposes is this: “How can we have both free speech and consideration for others, especially groups who have suffered tremendously in the past because of prejudice?”

When I first studied the Holocaust in the eighth grade, my classmates and I watched a movie called “The Hangman.” The premise of the film revolved around the public hanging of a man in a small, unknown town.

Every day, another town member was hung and not a soul spoke up against the act. Eventually, nobody was left – except for the hangman, of course.

We learned a very important lesson from that film. Many people all over the world, including within the United States, knew (at least had some vague understanding) of what was occurring in Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz. “The Pentagon knew, the State Department knew, the White House knew, most governments knew. Only the victims did not know,” Elie Wiesel said in a speech at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1993.

And yet, like the tragedy of the hangman’s tale, their mouths were kept shut. Choices were made not to bomb the gas chambers or even the railroads leading to the camps.

Unfortunately, I can’t alter history. But I can advocate free and open discussion. Therefore, Nazi symbols, though cruel and painful, should be controlled rather than outlawed. They must remain for the sake of free speech as well as historical honesty.

Perhaps the noblest way to treat history – and this particular kind of history – is by making it visible and well-known.

I’m a student of history myself, and I often contemplate how the past should be most appropriately represented.

Today, I write about a history that is very much my own. It is like a member of my family, indelibly present and irrevocable. And it cannot be made illegal or stored away until the wounds have diminished. The wounds will never disappear.

Instead, they should be made available, so as to help prevent future global crises.

Wiesel, during his speech in 1993, begged President Bill Clinton to go beyond the events of the 1930s and 40s and to look toward the future, in which conflicts still abound.

He brought up the crisis that he had witnessed the previous fall raging in the former Yugoslavia, stating, “I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country!”

This is the beginning of my own kind of questioning. Like Wiesel, I cannot fathom a sweeping away, an “end” to the Holocaust.

And I simply cannot support a banning of its history, whether it be through the erasure of museums, history books or the hateful groups and their symbols that helped incite the atrocities many years ago.

The legacy of Nazism extends beyond laws and reason, and it must remain – like the grim reminder found in my grandfather’s photograph.

Fried is a second-year history student. E-mail her at ifried@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.