Holocaust commemoration meta

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As 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.

delafina777: Comparing Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust. Price expresses something I also feel, but haven't been able to articulate fully:

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.

Comments

Re: Image description of the graphic essay

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17. Triple panel. But soon, an unexpected sense of alienation set in... a] The author and his wife look at some of the pictures of the prisoners from the previous panel. The wife points to the wall and comments Plosynski, Kasprzyck, Koszowski... I don't think that any of these prisoners were Jews. b] Close up of the guide, pointing to a blurry picture of a little girl being dragged by two uniformed, armed guards, explaining This is little Magda, who was taken from her parents' farm on Easter, of all days! c] The guide in front of a barred cell, explaining (white on black text] Here is the cell where they held the pious priest who selflessly sacrificed himself for the lives of the other prisoners.

18. 90% of the 1.1 million murdered at Auschwitz were Jews. But on the 3.5 hour tour, we learned mostly about the suffering of non-Jewish Poles. We learned of the righteous*, many who left food on the road for the starving prisoners, who adopted the orphaned children after liberation. 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 (Oy, thank G-d for deez righteous goyim, leaving us all dis delicious stuff) 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 We will raise you as our own, Moishe and Rivka and they reply You are a perfect mother! Please convert us IMMEDIATELY! Footnote: *Obsessed with Yad Vashem's "righteous among the nations award, but frustrated by its exacting standards, affiliates of Poland's right-wing Law and Justice party have created their own award, which they give out as they please.

19. What stung me most about about the tour's messaging was the repeated distinction made between Polish and Jewish victims ... when so many were both . The guide in the foreground explains to the group of tourists who are somewhat blurry: Poles were the original prisoners of the camp. They were eventually superseded by the influx of Jewish arrivals. The author stands next to his wife, just distinct from the vaguely drawn crowd, thinking . o O (Why is he not calling the Polish Jews 'Poles'?)

20. Of course, de-Judaization of the Holocaust is nothing new. For 40 years, Poland's Communist leaders purposefully inflated the number of non-Jewish deaths. 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 It is better to officially mourn one million dead Poles at Auschwitz, than to let the Jews keep making this all about themselves. Real Poles have suffered enough already. Label: Premier Marian Spychalski 1968-1970

21. It served the notion that that the war was simply one fought over political ideologies – Fascism versus Communism – a battle that the Communists won 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. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Poland's newly elected democratic government quietly adjusted the numbers. Portrait of a white-haired, moustache-wearing man in a suit, seated a desk, saying The new consensus among Holocaust scholars is that over 1 million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz, as were 70 to 75 thousand Poles, 20 thousand Roma, 15 thousand Soviet POWs, and 10 to 15 thousand other nationalities. Label: President Lech Wałęsa, 1990-1995.

23. But enough contemporary Poles, still viewing themselves as the primary victims, were happy to elect a right-wing government that enacted these popular sentiments into law. 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 This bill makes it illegal to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities And no more calling them Polish death camps, DAMMIT!!!. 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 They've even taken umbrage with a Netflix documentary using a WWII-era map labeled "Poland"

Re: Image description of the graphic essay

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24. To be clear, I don't believe that most contemporary Poles are purposefully trying to rewrite history or downplay the scope of Jewish suffering in Auschwitz. Rather they are so engrossed in the legacy of their own national trauma that they aren't giving much thought to it at all. Double panel, labelled across both Some additional things that give me pause. Left: the guide, finger upraised, explains Germany gaining new territories was their primary aim in the war* Footnote: *Not the wholesale murder of Europe's Jews Caption: 1. More hot takes on Nazi Germany's motives. Right: a pile of postcards with black-and-white images of the railway to the camp gates, the striped uniform, the ARBEIT MACHT FREI ironwork, the pile of prisoners' belongings, with a rotating postcard stand in the background. Caption: 2. The rack of collectible postcards in the gift shop, ♫ "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh" ♫

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 (WTF is a "Mexican Calzone"?) Caption: 3. Every single protein on the menu at the memorial's café includes pork. Inset image: a little bowl of coins decorated with a heart, with a handwritten cardboard sign reading Tips for travel to Las Vegas. Label Extra insensitivity points for the café's cute tip jar!

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: 4. Selfies, selfies, selfies! They're officially banned at the memorial, but that didn't stop the thirst trap session I saw on the train track at Birkenau, or the neo-Nazi troll with a selfie stick, grinning in front of a cattle car

27. Panel with a wobbly border. One of the final stops at Auschwitz 1 is a memorial to the Polish dead. Bouquets of red and white roses, along with other offerings, are placed before a bullet-pocked wall. 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 This is the very wall where many brave Polish prisoners were executed by their Nazi persecutors.

28. I learned later that Yad Vashem curated its own barracks with an exhibition called Shoah, but this was neither a stop on the tour, nor was it mentioned to us. 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. So for now, I'm left to imagine a different Auschwitz, where such a prominent memorial exists just for the million Jewish victims. 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 Now, follow me to the Polish-Jewish victims' memorial.

30. Of course, it would need to be adjusted for scale. 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 It's kind of everywhere, so watch where you step. Caption: ... And proportion