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.
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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.
