Memories from Auschwitz
As I stepped into Block 4 at Auschwitz I, a placard confronted me with a simple quote: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Trudging past piles of tiny childrens’ shoes, men’s eyeglasses, tallits, and locks of women’s hair behind glass planes, I could only think of the quote as the living testimony of those inanimate objects, binding me to the fate of the dead. Yet, moral indignation slowly turned to dismay. Moments after exiting the entrance gate, I quietly laid down the memory of a Jewish man shot to death for stealing from a cauldron of soup, for the short peace of a morning bagel at McDonalds.
At times, it is simply natural for us to forget and want to forget. Our brains erase memories to make space for new, allowing us to fully live in the present. It is a relief that incidents of pain that were once so real and harrowing, fade as time passes. Often, the worst pains are caused by memories that we cannot forget, a past that revisits us against our own wishes. According to a study of 124 survivors of the Holocaust, half suffered from “sleep disturbance, recurrent nightmares, and intense distress over reminders.” Another study found that the traumatic experience of survivors even have intergenerational effects, rendering their descendents to be more prone to anxiety disorders. But beyond pain, deep traumatic memory kills the individual from within. Composer Ella Milch reconciled with her father Baruch Milch, a Holocaust survivor who wrote “Can Heaven Be Void’, through the realization that “I was raised in the house of a dead man, a strong man, but a dead man.”
‘Too much’ memory can fuel revenge. Late historian Yehudah Elkanah and many others worriedly observed that Israel suffered from a surplus of memory, burdened by symbols and ceremonies of its traumatic past, fueling some to justify cruelty to Palestinians. Indeed, the ruling Likud party rose to power by rallying the public with the message of Israeli victimization and has backed Palestinians, displaced not so long after the Holocaust, behind ghetto walls.
Forgetting, can thus be thought as a way to move forward. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion promoted a culture of mamlakhtiyut (roughly translated as “statism”) to create a strong Israel independent from international mercy or sympathy. The Holocaust was thus taught in the context of non-jewish history in public education. The continuation of such policies led Holocaust survivor Yakov Shilhav to write in 1958 that “among the Israeli public, Judaism’s greatest catastrophe is gradually being forgotten. We sense a disregard… both intentional and official.”
Nevertheless, at times, it is our curse to forget. Memories we once held dear, become lost in time. It is disorienting to realize that incidents of pain that were once so real and harrowing, fade as time passes, as if they were mere figments of one’s imagination. Often, the worst pains are caused by the isolation of memory, because the most painful of memories have become an indelible part of our collective and personal identity. This is what prompted former President of Israel Teachers Union Shalom Levin to boldly present the motion to the Knesset to discuss the status of Holocaust memory in public education, asking the party “are we fulfilling our commitment to remember our people who were annihilated and wiped off the face of the earth?” This is why in response to the existential threats imposed by the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israeli youth desired to learn more of the Holocaust in their journey to understand their roots. This is why after years of inhumane torture, survivors returned to Birkenau to serve as its first tour guides, standing as living testimonies of the evils of genocide.
Humanity progresses by embracing a fragile balance of forgetting and remembering. This is because we are neither permanent residents of the past nor the present, rather migrants seeking a better future. Education is the collective task of removing weights from one side while putting weights on the other to maintain the balance, as generations and nations walk on the thin tight-line of history. A choice to overemphasize or underemphasize certain memories, accompanied with a rigid adherence to an ideologically framework, accompanies the cost of alienating people and “new but old” issues of the present. The current rise of the extreme right, terrorism, and expressed discontent of people in Europe indicate an imbalance, and are symptoms of a larger social collapse if left unattended.
The lack of direct, candid, and comprehensive discussion fosters division. Although the burnings at Jedwabne are a deplorable part of Poland’s history, the Jewish community must remember the Warsaw uprising, when hundreds of thousands of Polish people sacrificed their lives fighting against the Nazis, who left Warsaw completely destroyed. People respond emotionally quite naturally, when Russian POWs, political prisoners of Germany, Polish, gypsies, disabled, and homosexuals aren’t given their due in the annals of the Holocaust memory. Even when holocaust denial is tabooed by domestic criminal law of European states, revisionist history will persist, because shunning discussion in the public arena only drives discussions underground, creating isolated enclaves for twisted memories to deeply root.
It is important to begin discussions early on and to continue them, as there will always be people who try to manipulate memory to forward their political ends. Indeed an integral part of the Final Solution was to burn books — the Books of Moses and scrolls of the synagogues — to destroy the spiritual roots of the Jewish people. In the final hours of Nazi rule, the Nazis set fire to the extermination camps and bury their survivors in nameless mass graves to allude prosecution. This is because a monopoly of memory is a monopoly of power, a fact that Churchill implied in his statement that “history is written by the victors.”
Given the records of history however, individuals are free to make choices. Despite how well documented the Holocaust is, both by diaries of the victims and the meticulous documents of the SS, Robert Faurisson has the freedom to deny the Holocaust and Noam Chomsky has the freedom to defend him. Le Pen has the freedom to announce at the Summer School of Front National that he does not believe in the equality of races, despite the millions of French lives taken by aryanism. Likewise, one can seek the remains of ghetto walls in Krakow and Warsaw and still deny their existence. It is one’s choice to embark on that endeavor in the first place.
Nevertheless, responsibility trails the choices individuals make. Though Hitler admitted later that “if I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written [Mein Kampf],” 5.2million copies in eleven languages were distributed throughout Europe, given free to every newlywed german couple, and held close to the hearts of german soldiers fighting on the battlefields.
Covered with decaying moss and tilted as if to embody the victims final moments of agony, the tombs at the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw are remnants of the world that came from Hitler’s choice. As I walked on the snowy pathway, three little boys passed by, holding phones in their hands, seeking ghastly Pokemon amongst the soiled graves. I fear our reticence will condemn these children to repeat the past they will not wish to remember.
Pictures from — Poland (Warsaw, Krakow, Berlin) | 2018.3