Brought forward from November 2005
Visitors to Auschwitz and other Holocaust memorials are often moved to tears by the shoes, or other homely items of the victims. Perhaps because of advance preparation, such things don’t move me as much. What has tightened my throat and brought tears to my eyes are the things which took me by surprise: At the Museum of Terror in Budapest, the focus was on the persecution that was absorbed by Hungarians in general by the Germans and the Soviets. In most exhibits, the Jews were neither excluded nor singled out. But in one film, a man was speaking about the horrors taking place in his neighborhood, to his friends and own family and suddenly bursts into tears “Why did they have to do that to the Jews? They took them away and killed them.” The word “Jews” was not an abstraction to this man. The word conjured up memories of actual individuals he had known and cared about.
Speaking with an elderly man in Romania, I asked where the synagogue had been. He couldn’t remember exactly, only that it had been on a side street. He remembered that a few Jews had come back after the war, but sold the synagogue because there were not enough of them. They left for parts unknown. It was bad for everyone, he thought. People wondered whether their families would be taken and killed. More of the Jews were killed, he believed. This struck me as a little distant and unsympathetic. In the West, we regard the Holocaust as one of the pivotal events of the 20th C, debating whether anything can be compared to it. We can afford to do that because we have some distance. To those up close, there is plenty to compare it to: the death of your own wife or son at the same hands. Seeing through this gentile's eyes made the Jewish loss suddenly larger, not smaller. I had now more fully understood the fear and loss of losing a tenth of one’s family to cruel men. From there I could better understand the loss of nine-tenths, which had been unreal before that.
When reading about the Ukrainian soldiers who were given the duty of executing many Jews -- how it was considered a bad job, a difficult job, a draining job, I held the soldiers’ difficulty of no account. They were victimizing, not victims. But in one account a man who had killed several hundred had a sudden apprehension of the next victim, a child, as a real human being, and it shattered him. Reading the story made the single child real for me as well. One death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic
3 comments:
That is powerful, AVI!
To me, the Holocaust revealed the darkest of evil,
and the real danger of pascifistic and apathetic souls.
The countries that explicitly and implicitly opened the gate for the blackest of evil
to enter cannot escape their accountability for the results.
We must keep that history in the forefront of our thoughts, lest we help repeat it.
Over time, meditating on the Holocaust and on history in general I have come to view the Holocaust not as unique but rather as an emblematic event: there is not a single outrage commited by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe that had not been visited many times over on countless millions of other innocent men, women, and children over the past several thousand years. The difference is that the Holocaust was committed in the full light of history and its victims, so far from being illiterate, faceless human beings living in obscurity, were the most literate people on earth with the longest historical memory. This doesn't diminish the significance of the Holocaust. On the contrary, it universalizes it. A terrible human price has been paid to build the modern world. We must never forget.
I visited a concentration camp this past summer. It was a facility run by the SS, and it was mostly a regional holding station. It was a grim experience, seeing the internment rooms, and coming to terms with the idea that 600 people were held in this room, lying 6 across, row after row, stacked 4 bunks high in wooden bunks that were continuous around the room's perimeter. With 4 open toilets for the population and a single small wood stove. It was clarifying, and it left me furious. The Germans, after notifying the Jews of their coming internment, advertised it as a 'spa'. They did this so convincingly that many Jews showed up in their finery, with their steamer trunks, expecting a holiday. Such was the perfidious sadism of their hosts. And while it wasn't a death camp, the death rate was such that there was a multi-furnace crematorium, complete with autopsy tables - for the gold fillings.
Our tour guide was in her 70s, and this was the Czech Republic. Her father was sent off to western Germany as slave labor, and returned, no longer able to function because of illness, poor diet, exhaustion. He wasn't a Jew though, so he was allowed to return home. She still hates Germans. Her daughter, having experiences limited to the Iron Curtain, hates Russians. And yet - here we are, again. In our own country, now, out in the open, loud & proud.
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