My first instinct is that I wouldn’t erase anything.
That probably sounds strange, especially considering how much horror fills human history, but every event becomes part of what follows. We learn from it. We react to it. Nations rise and fall because of it. People make decisions because of it. Change one thing and you have no idea what else changes with it.
Years ago, I played a Mac game called Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. The premise involved changing history through decisions made aboard the Titanic. If you did one thing but failed to do another, Adolf Hitler never became dictator of Germany and instead became a famous artist — but communism spread across Europe and eventually conquered the world. Make a different choice and the communists never rose to power, but Hitler’s Germany became unstoppable instead.
You had to get everything exactly right to avoid replacing one evil empire with another.
That game has always stuck with me because it illustrates the problem with changing history. We know what happened. We don’t know what would have happened instead.
It’s easy to say I’d prevent September 11, 2001. I’d certainly love to spare nearly 3,000 people from dying that day and countless others from everything that followed.
But if I’m choosing one event, it probably has to be the Holocaust.
Six million Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany, along with millions of other people the Nazis considered undesirable or threatening. Entire families disappeared. Communities that had existed for generations were destroyed. Children were murdered for nothing more than being born into the wrong family.
If somebody handed me a magic wand and told me I could erase that, I don’t think I could refuse.
But I’d want a very specific kind of magic wand.
I don’t want to go back and assassinate Hitler as a young man because I have no idea who replaces him. I don’t want to change one election, prevent one speech or alter one battle and then discover that something even worse fills the vacuum. History isn’t a straight line. It’s an enormous web of causes and consequences, and pulling one strand can move everything else.
So my wish would have conditions.
Erase the Holocaust. Save the people who would have died. Let them live their lives, raise their children and grow old. But somehow don’t replace that horror with another one. No Nazi conquest of Europe. No Soviet conquest of Europe. No unforeseen monster rising because history suddenly has an opening.
Basically, I’d need the kind of wand that understands what I mean instead of looking for a loophole.
Of course, no such wand exists.
And maybe that’s ultimately the point of the question. We can’t erase history. The Holocaust happened. September 11 happened. Slavery happened. Wars, genocides, assassinations and atrocities happened, and wishing otherwise doesn’t change any of them.
What we can do is remember.
We can study what happened, understand how people allowed it to happen and recognize the warning signs when they begin appearing again. We can refuse to sanitize evil simply because enough time has passed. And we can teach the next generation that history isn’t just a collection of dates and names. It’s a record of what human beings are capable of doing to one another.
I still don’t like the idea of erasing history.
But if you hand me that perfect magic wand, I’m stopping the Holocaust.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt
