Lucia Lopez
Quinn makes a comparison between the slave trade and the Holocaust and the famine emigration early in the essay only to reject it later. Why?
In “In Search of Banished Children,” Peter Quinn discusses the hardships of Irish immigrants during and after the Famine and the effects on the succeeding generations of Irish-Americans. When he describes the volume of migration of Irish people into the United States, he uses an quote by a historian named Robert James Scally, in which he says that the amount of Irish immigrants bared “more resemblance to the slave trade or the boxcars of the Holocaust than to the routine crossings of a later age.” Soon after, Quinn dispels the idea that the Famine can be compared to the Holocaust or the slave trade, saying that these events should not be “confused or equated”.
One may wonder why he chooses to include this comparison, only to reject it later. When he first mentions the Holocaust and the slave trade, it is merely to describe the immense migration that occurred after the Famine. This event pushed out so many people that could not live in Ireland anymore that the numbers seemed to match up with those of events in which people were forced to move. The comparison, in these terms, serves to show how intense the effects of the Famine were on the Irish people. When he says that the events themselves cannot be equated, he gives many reasons for why this is so. When discussing the Holocaust, he says, “The Holocaust was a death sentence leveled against every Jewish man, woman, and child under German rule. No exceptions.” He makes sure to point out that although the Famine had horrible consequences, it was not an organized institution whose purpose was to exterminate a people as the Holocaust was. When discussing the slave trade, he mentions that the experiences of Irish immigrants are similar in that they provided the labor that built America. However, the Irish maintained most of their civil rights, and they were not stripped of their identities as the slaves or the Holocaust victims were. An interesting point he speaks about as well is that as generations passed, the children and grandchildren of the Famine generation gradually had less memories and stories of the struggles of older generations. Because of the impact the slave trade had on the history of not only America but the world, it is much harder to forget the atrocities that slaves and their successors faced.
