Holocaust commemoration meta
Jan. 29th, 2020 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAs every year, I found Holocaust Memorial Day very alienating. But I did come across a couple of essays I wanted to share (if you can cope with reading about genocide):
Ari Richter: Never again will I visit Auschwitz. (Graphic essay, will transcribe / describe the images in a comment.) Richter talks about how the concentration camp has been commodified as a tourist experience and incorporated into Polish nationalist propaganda.
![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
delafina777: Comparing Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust. Price expresses something I also feel, but haven't been able to articulate fully:
Let me emphasise here that I am absolutely NOT saying that non-Jews shouldn't commemorate the Nazi Holocaust. I'm in no sense the boss of Holocaust commemoration anyway, but my opinion is the opposite of that. Anyone who has any connection at all to the perpetrators or the victims absolutely should learn about and remember and respond to that history. So that's pretty much all Europeans, all Christians, everyone who identifies with any of the minorities persecuted and murdered by the Nazis. Indeed, I would say that Holocaust Memorial Day is probably mainly for non-Jews. We have our own day when we commemorate in a community context.
What I'm saying, and why those links resonated with me, is that the Holocaust was senseless murder and cruelty on a scale we can't really get our heads round. Trying to make commemoration (whether visiting sites or holding ceremonies or whatever) into an uplifting, meaningful "experience", whether religious or psychological, is, IMO, deeply disrespectful. And yes, that is a problem when Jews do it too; I've been left feeling sickened and alienated by Jewish ceremonies with beautiful, sad-sounding violin music and poetry readings and arranging the memorial candles to create an ambience. To quote Price again, our duty is
Part of it is... for the first 30 years of my life, my social circle included a fair number of Survivors. The Holocaust, the Shoah, wasn't some tragic episode in history, or an abstract theological problem, it was the personal experience of many of the people I interacted with regularly. I remember R' G., an exceptionally gentle and loving person, barely holding back from physically attacking some contrarian undergraduate who thought it was clever to ask whether anything good came from the Holocaust. I remember Sarah FB talking about how she only took LSD once in the 60s, because under the influence she had flashbacks to Kristallnacht which she had lived through at the age of three. I remember Alice W reminding us young 'uns that it's important to take good care of your teeth, because when she was in the [concentration] camp her friend had such bad toothache that she climbed the fence in a fake escape attempt to get herself shot.
All those people are gone now. They died of old age, incredibly, they lived to see several decades after a powerful nation / empire put serious effort into trying to murder them. I mean, there are still people alive who remember the Holocaust but only just – there's a member of our community who believes she is the youngest Survivor, having been born three days before the liberation of Auschwitz. Which, as all the HMD material pointed out, was 75 years ago. But because of the time that's elapsed, the Holocaust seems to have morphed into this distant thing, just history that people have feelings or opinions about. Just one more bad thing in the list of bad stuff that's part of human experience, like bullying or earthquakes. And I think a lot of people who didn't grow up in the kind of Jewish community I did probably didn't regularly socialize with Survivors. They maybe met one educator who came to speak at their school one day, or not even that. And people want stuff they learn about to be meaningful, they want to fit information into the rest of their experience. That's a very natural response, but because to me it's something that really happened to people I care about, I find that imposition of meaning really hard to cope with.
Ari Richter: Never again will I visit Auschwitz. (Graphic essay, will transcribe / describe the images in a comment.) Richter talks about how the concentration camp has been commodified as a tourist experience and incorporated into Polish nationalist propaganda.
The idea that the Shoah is inexplicable--while individual people's stories need to be told, I find the idea of making the entire thing into a cohesive narrative--especially one with a moral--unethical.(Twitter thread; some people consider it unethical to transform long Twitter threads into more accessible formats, so if you want to read it but can't deal with Twitter formatting, I'll PM you a plain text copy.)
Let me emphasise here that I am absolutely NOT saying that non-Jews shouldn't commemorate the Nazi Holocaust. I'm in no sense the boss of Holocaust commemoration anyway, but my opinion is the opposite of that. Anyone who has any connection at all to the perpetrators or the victims absolutely should learn about and remember and respond to that history. So that's pretty much all Europeans, all Christians, everyone who identifies with any of the minorities persecuted and murdered by the Nazis. Indeed, I would say that Holocaust Memorial Day is probably mainly for non-Jews. We have our own day when we commemorate in a community context.
What I'm saying, and why those links resonated with me, is that the Holocaust was senseless murder and cruelty on a scale we can't really get our heads round. Trying to make commemoration (whether visiting sites or holding ceremonies or whatever) into an uplifting, meaningful "experience", whether religious or psychological, is, IMO, deeply disrespectful. And yes, that is a problem when Jews do it too; I've been left feeling sickened and alienated by Jewish ceremonies with beautiful, sad-sounding violin music and poetry readings and arranging the memorial candles to create an ambience. To quote Price again, our duty is
to help make sure the violence is *stopped,* not to tear up like it's a sad scene in a TV show(in context she's talking about Christians, but I think it's true of everybody.)
Part of it is... for the first 30 years of my life, my social circle included a fair number of Survivors. The Holocaust, the Shoah, wasn't some tragic episode in history, or an abstract theological problem, it was the personal experience of many of the people I interacted with regularly. I remember R' G., an exceptionally gentle and loving person, barely holding back from physically attacking some contrarian undergraduate who thought it was clever to ask whether anything good came from the Holocaust. I remember Sarah FB talking about how she only took LSD once in the 60s, because under the influence she had flashbacks to Kristallnacht which she had lived through at the age of three. I remember Alice W reminding us young 'uns that it's important to take good care of your teeth, because when she was in the [concentration] camp her friend had such bad toothache that she climbed the fence in a fake escape attempt to get herself shot.
All those people are gone now. They died of old age, incredibly, they lived to see several decades after a powerful nation / empire put serious effort into trying to murder them. I mean, there are still people alive who remember the Holocaust but only just – there's a member of our community who believes she is the youngest Survivor, having been born three days before the liberation of Auschwitz. Which, as all the HMD material pointed out, was 75 years ago. But because of the time that's elapsed, the Holocaust seems to have morphed into this distant thing, just history that people have feelings or opinions about. Just one more bad thing in the list of bad stuff that's part of human experience, like bullying or earthquakes. And I think a lot of people who didn't grow up in the kind of Jewish community I did probably didn't regularly socialize with Survivors. They maybe met one educator who came to speak at their school one day, or not even that. And people want stuff they learn about to be meaningful, they want to fit information into the rest of their experience. That's a very natural response, but because to me it's something that really happened to people I care about, I find that imposition of meaning really hard to cope with.
Image description of the graphic essay
Date: 2020-01-29 06:27 pm (UTC)2. Caption: . Three people standing viewed from above, with the packed full bus just visible in the background. A man with dark curly hair, a blue shirt and glasses asks . A blond person wearing a shirt labelled 'GUIDE' listens with his hands on his hips. A woman with long dark hair wearing a sleeveless top and a blue skirt looks on.
3. Close-up on the guide's face. He gesticulates while saying . The face of the man from the previous panel is partly visible in profile.
4. Caption: . The man from the previous two panels says as he tries to climb on to the bus where a crowd of people pressed tightly together stand in the doorway.
5. Caption: Scene inside a very crowded bus, where a lot of unhappy-looking tourists are strap-hanging and jostling for space.
6. Caption: A divided image, half showing the back of the yellow bus, and half showing a train carriage with slatted wooden walls.
7. Two half panels. a] A typed sheet with dot matrix printer holes down one side reads . The man with glasses is almost entirely obscured by a book that looks as if it was bound at home like a school project titled . b] . We see the back of the man's head as he looks at a laptop screen. His thought bubble reads . o O (There don't seem to be any records that my great-great-grandmother Jeannette and her son Leo died in Auschwitz, specifically, but it stands to reason since they lived with Moritz, Augustine and Liesel Richter, who died there.)
8. Close up of a spreadsheet with a list of names and how they were related to the author, titled , and labelled 17 names are visible including some distant cousins.
Re: Image description of the graphic essay
Date: 2020-01-29 06:52 pm (UTC)10. A huge queue stretching as far as the eye can see waits behind temporary traffic barriers and temporary metal fences on a tarmaced area. Most of the background has the brick buildings of the Auschwitz barracks. In the foreground, the author and his wife ask A white-appearing person wearing sunglasses holds up four fingers and replies Caption:
11. . A closer-in view of the crowd standing outside the barracks. There are guides standing around with signs on sticks. A group of three tourists in the foreground all have headphones round their necks attached to portable audio devices clipped on to their clothing. Various members of the crowd make inane tourist comments in various languages. Something in Polish I can't read, something in Chinese I can't read, in Italian, and in Hebrew.
12. Close up of the back of the author's head. He is looking at his his purple badge labelled 'English' and thinking of a row of badges in different colours labelled with times, languages and 'Auschwitz-Birkenau', and mentally comparing it with a Nazi-printed chart with different coloured triangles labelling the different classes of prisoner. Footnote:
13. The blond guide from the bus stands in front of a doorway labelled '11'. The guide explains to a crowd of listening tourists with their backs to the reader that
14. Text only panel:
15. Four panels. Caption: a] pile of shoes b] pile of old-fashioned suitcases with their owners' names chalked on them. The most prominent says . c] pile of artificial limbs, braces and other medical equipment / mobility aids d] indistinct pile of fuzzy stuff lit by light reflected from the glass. Caption
16. Long gallery disappearing to the vanishing point, with both walls lined with framed pictures of people wearing striped concentration camp uniforms. A group of tourists, mostly wearing headphones, look at the pictures, with the author in the centre.
Re: Image description of the graphic essay
Date: 2020-01-29 07:22 pm (UTC)18. Double panel of imagined images of the stories the museum evokes. Left: a man in striped camp uniform kneels in a road picking up bread and sausages, thinking . o O () Other foodstuffs are lying around in the road. A blond man with a kind smile observes from behind a road sign pointing to Auschwitz in one direction and Birkenau in the other. Right: a blonde woman in a purple dress kneels to hug two emaciated children in striped camp uniforms with prominent yellow stars. She tells them and they reply Footnote: .
19. . The guide in the foreground explains to the group of tourists who are somewhat blurry: . The author stands next to his wife, just distinct from the vaguely drawn crowd, thinking . o O ()
20. . A man in military uniform sits cross-legged, smoking a cigarette. He is drawn in the style of a black and white photo, and he says . Label: Premier Marian Spychalski 1968-1970
21. Stalin stands triumphant over the body of Hitler, holding a gun and raising his hand in the air. The hammer and sickle flag flies behind Stalin, while Hitler lies on a red banner with the Swastika.
22. Portrait of a white-haired, moustache-wearing man in a suit, seated a desk, saying Label: President Lech Wałęsa, 1990-1995.
23. . A clean-shaven man in a suit and blue tie stands behind a podium with the Polish coat of arms. The entire background is filled with red and white Polish flags. He speaks into a microphone, saying . Label: President Andrzej Duda, 2015 -- Part of the image is overlaid with a sc/reenshot of a Tweet from the Polish Ministry of foreign affairs complaining about a pictured map. The footnote says
Re: Image description of the graphic essay
Date: 2020-01-29 07:48 pm (UTC)25. Back view of a man wearing a grey kippah, looking at a counter of food with the menu behind it on a large blackboard, thinking . o O () Caption: . Inset image: a little bowl of coins decorated with a heart, with a handwritten cardboard sign reading . Label
26. Split panel. Left: several tourists sitting or standing on the train tracks in front of the barracks, using their mobile phones. High barbed wire fence in the distant background. Right: A blond man with sunglasses posing glamourously with a selfie stick, sitting on the train tracks in front of the cattle car carriage. Other tourists in the background. Overlays with imagined images of what the selfies being taken might look like. Caption:
27. Panel with a wobbly border. The guide and some other tourists stand in front of a wall festooned with red and white flowers and wreaths, with two large Polish flags flying over the memorial. The guide says
28. . Similar wall to the previous panel, this one with a yellow Jewish star, and blue and white instead of red and white flowers. The memorial is in shadow and there are no tourists visible.
29. . Aerial view of two rows of barracks, with the Polish memorial on the right at the end of one row, and the Jewish memorial on the left at the end of the next row. The guide is almost too tiny to see from this perspective, but he has a speech bubble with .
30. . Zoomed out aerial view of multiple rows of barracks. All but one of them (with the original red and white memorial) have blue and white memorials at the ends. The tiny speck of a guide is saying Caption:
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-29 06:35 pm (UTC)That said, I'm still not entirely convinced that there won't be a place for that kind of valorisation in the next century as the Shoah completely fades into history. Ocular proof as Othello said.
At any rate, thanks for this. I avoided most of the hoopla this year for reasons I couldn't articulate, so thank you for articulating at least a part of what I was feeling.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-29 06:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-29 06:59 pm (UTC)I avoided it, too; I didn't want to do performative mourning. And I have an uncomfortable relationship (that's the only way at the moment I can think to phrase it) with the Holocaust because I'm a convert: it both is and isn't mine. I'm far more comfortable with YomHaShoah; I agree that Holocaust Memorial Day feels more for everyone else.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-29 07:20 pm (UTC)I've never been to a camp. When I was thirteen, my parents and I went to Munich with my grandmother, a survivor, at her request. She said she wanted to see Dachau; my dad was incredulous but agreed to the trip. Instead, we spent a day driving around Munich looking for the Displaced Persons camp she'd lived in after the war. We found it. She looked at the house where she'd lived as a refugee. And then the next morning she woke up and said, "Forget about Dachau, let's get out of this country right now," so we left. I expect that's the closest I'll ever get.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-29 10:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-29 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-30 01:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-31 09:44 am (UTC)Five years ago, the number of survivors from there who returned for the seventieth anniversary was twice the number who lived to 1945 from the Reinhardt camps in Poland, despite the way that roughly twice as many were murdered in those. Similarly the Einsatzgruppen victims barely get a mention.
The two places I've visited and would recommend for not being commodified are both in Berlin: the House of the Wannsee Conference and the Jewish Museum. The latter uses architecture in a particularly effective way.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-01 12:01 am (UTC)Sobibor, ten or so fewer; and out of the half-million who went to Bełżec, I hear no more than seven lived to see the war's end, and even that number is disputed.
Likewise, Chełmno: I know of it through the personal testimony of a man who referred to it as Kulmhof; and that testimony, in a communist regime, led to him ending up in a Midlands rag-town, far from the country he grew up in, where all the politically-inconvenient refugees end up.
The effort that went into suppressing the significance of these sites in postwar Poland is disturbing: further, most of those who were sent there were Polish and, after the war, they had compelling reasons to stay quiet about it.
Those reasons may well be relevant again, today, if any of them are still living.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-31 09:24 pm (UTC)1) To say it's one story, any one story, is to leave out important stuff. It's just too big for a single narrative. We say you won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big space is, and space is mostly empty. The Shoah is too big to think about all at once, and every bit of it is made of human beings.
2) When we call people "monsters," we imply they are incomprehensibly unlike human beings. Unfortunately, human beings have the capacity for bullying and toadying and selfishness and xenophobia and cruelty. Those aren't inhuman. The Nazi Monster story pushes us to say, "don't worry, they aren't genocidal monsters or anything," when people set up ethnic cleansing and are kind to animals.
3) I have a problem with the idea that victims only matter if they are perfectly innocent and idealized martyrs. The Nazis murdered people of heroic virtue who would risk their lives to help others, and they murdered thieves and tax cheats and military deserters. Decades later: "The people in those camps are no angels, some of them defaulted on loans or forged documents. How dare you compare us to Nazis?"
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-31 11:15 pm (UTC)I don't understand what she means by saying the Shoah is not reflected in the liturgy. I know the idea that "the" liturgy was fixed by the time of the Baal Shem Tov (of blessed memory) and anything else you want to say is technically between liturgy rather than "liturgy." I'm accustomed to seeing a lot of Holocaust references in the Haggadah, and at Yom Kippur afternoon services.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-01 10:41 pm (UTC)I think this depends on whether one has survivors in one's life or not. One of the shuls I occasionally attend here had their last survivor die about a year ago, and it was a big thing for them, marking the end of an era; whereas my shul still has a member who lived through the labour camps. (He used to come every Shabbos; having lost most of his mobility, he's only an occasional attendee now.)
Two or three years ago, someone at work said "Gesundheit!" particularly forcefully when someone sneezed, and a German colleague said "If you're going to say it like that, you have to add 'Mein Führer!'" I was a bit taken aback; I said nothing at the time, but subsequently sent him a message saying that although it's distant history for him, it's still living memory for some people (by chance I had had the Holocaust survivor I mentioned above as a Friday night dinner guest the previous week, so I mentioned that). I also told him that I'm rare as a Jew in not having close family who died in the Holocaust; and also talked about what it is to be a second generation survivor (which is something that, even as a Jew myself, I had no idea about until I got to know R. Jonathan Wittenberg). My colleague subsequently apologised, but again, my point is that without having had Holocaust survivors in his life, his attitude to the Holocaust was much different from mine.
I wonder how it's going to be for my son, for whom there are unlikely to be any living survivors for him to know by the time he's going to be old enough to learn about the Holocaust.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-03 05:47 pm (UTC)I don't know what the magic is to get people to realize that they can think of themselves as fundamentally good people and still excuse or perpetuate fundamentally terrible things, but that seems like one of the necessary things to learn.