Six on the Holocaust: International Holocaust Remembrance Day is today!; Remembering the Holocaust in an era of rising anti-S
panaritisp
"Today marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945. It also marks three months since the massacre at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that claimed 11 Jewish lives, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
On the first Holocaust Remembrance Day since that massacre, it is worth asking: What good are the annual rituals of Holocaust commemoration when anti-Semitic violence continues and is actually worsening? What good is saying “never forget”? What’s the use of remembering?
Given the persistence of violence against Jews and other marginalized groups singled out for their race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality or gender identity, a certain amount of skepticism toward ritual remembrance is warranted. When we invoke the power of memory, we implicitly argue the past has something to teach us, something that we can apply to the present to thwart the violence of bigotry.
But does it? Pittsburgh came on the heels of a nationally published survey revealing an alarming lack of knowledge about the Holocaust in America, especially among younger generations. Would better historical memory help reverse the anti-Semitic turn in American politics in recent years? And does Holocaust remembrance actually give us that better historical memory?"
|
"While Kurt was indifferent to school – preferring to focus on his social gifts – my parents nourished my curiosity, and I excelled academically. It was a good life: In my first three years of high school, I would relish the morning walk up the Wallstrasse, turn into Buchheimer Street at the corner where our family’s second shoe store was located and then cut across the square in front of the church. Sometimes, I would drop in at the Schubach family home to enjoy a piece of Mrs. Schubach’s cake. On the way home, I would walk my loyal friend Jojo Mohl’s dog, a German shepherd named Chasseau, who would wait at the door for me every afternoon. I dreamed of wearing the distinctive white cap of the Primaner, the upper-class scholar, and becoming a professor of literature or philosophy – or maybe even a rabbi. As a child, I fell in love for the first time, with Ruth Speier-Holstein, the oldest of our family doctor’s three daughters – deluging me with emotions that I had read about but never experienced before. I fervently shared in German patriotism and the mystical love for the Fatherland – and why not? Life was beautiful.
History books will tell you that everything changed on Jan. 30, 1933, when the National Socialist German Workers' Party rode a wave of extreme patriotism and chauvinistic nationalism into government with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor. The reality, though, is that things were dire before that. The German economy was in grave and deepening crisis; millions were unemployed; the working class became impoverished; and far-left communists and far-right members of Hitler’s Nazi Party were growing in numbers, sparking bloody battles in the streets.
But history books can be cold and impersonal, divorced from the emotions of people’s lived reality. One does not tend to realize you’re living through history until it’s over.
While Hitler shamelessly campaigned on an anti-Semitic platform – which was even spelled out, plain as day, in his virulent book Mein Kampf – most Germans did not take that part of his political message seriously, intrigued instead by his prescriptions for blunt civic pride after Germany’s Great War humiliations and Weimar Republic governments that were seen to be meekly following the Treaty of Versailles. Even when the Nazis started enacting their anti-Jewish agenda as soon as they took over, Jews and opponents of the regime optimistically believed that it would only be a year before the party would get swept away democratically for failing to keep the rest of their ambitious promises. The Jewry had been woven into the fabric of German life for more than a century, after all, and that was a comfort to a generation of German Jews – which included my parents – who refused to read the writing on the wall, or even the country’s long history of blending nationalism with anti-Semitism. I myself read the newspapers regularly and observed the turbulent political scene, but I did not realize that the violent currents in public life would affect me personally; I had been happy, sheltered and favoured."
"On October 3, 2011, at 8:30 AM, during the High Holy Days of the Jewish New Year, I walked into Block 24 at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland. Block 24, a former prisoner barrack, rectangular, with a pitch roof, is constructed of red brick. Unlike the majority of barracks at the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp, which were built of wood and are now all gone due to decay, Block 24 still stands, a brick remnant of the Polish military base located at that site before World War II, before the Nazis took over the facility and turned it into the most notorious death camp the world has ever known.
The Auschwitz–Birkenau camp is now a state-run museum and Block 24 hosts the archivists’ office. Before my arrival, the last member of my family I know of to walk these grounds was my father, Leon Hershkowitz, when he was a prisoner in this death camp. Whether other ancestors of mine were imprisoned in Auschwitz during the Nazis’ war against the Jews, I do not know. Every Yom Kippur in my boyhood home, before reciting Kaddish for the dead, my mother, Helen Hershkowitz, lit twenty-two yahrzeit candles in memory of my parents’ children, as well as my parents’ parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews who were murdered by the Nazis. Who among those family members perished at Auschwitz I do not know. My father’s first wife and two sons were murdered before he was sent to Auschwitz, and my mother’s first husband and daughter were murdered also, most likely in Stutthof or Dachau, the two death camps in which she spent virtually the entire war."
|
"It is known as the Holocaust. Jews call it the “Shoah” – an ancient word for "disaster” or “catastrophe." The mass, industrialized murder of European Jewry, the culmination of centuries of hate in an explosion of unimaginable brutality, left nearly six million Jews dead. Not killed in battle or even casualties of war but put to death, often in factories built expressly for murder.
Since the gruesome discoveries of just how Nazi Germany set about eradicating Europe's Jews, aided and abetted by anti-Semitic or just cowed populations, mankind has struggled to understand what happened. And to answer the ultimate question – could it happen again? The subject is exhaustively covered in media, literature – and cinema, too, where some set out to document, some to investigate and some even, finally, to riff. Directors wonder, dabble in alternate realities and ask: What if? And then what if?
What won't you find on this list? Stephen Spielberg's 1993 ..."
If you cannot see this email properly, please click here | |||||||||||
|
