Michael Ejercito
2016-05-01 16:30:16 UTC
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/30/never-forget-world-said-holocaust-but-world-forgetting/59cUqLNFxylkW7BDuRPgNK/story.html
JEFF JACOBY
‘Never forget,’ the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting
By Jeff Jacoby GLOBE COLUMNIST MAY 01, 2016
LONG BEFORE THE Holocaust had run its course, there was already a desperate
urge to keep it from being forgotten. In hiding and on the run, amid the
shadows of gas chambers and the smoke of crematoria, Jews frantically sought
ways to bear witness to the enormities of the Nazis. Surrounded by horror,
anticipating their own deaths, they appealed to the future: Remember.
In his Nobel Prize lecture in 1986, Elie Wiesel recalled the eminent
historian Simon Dubnow, who over and over implored his fellow inhabitants in
the Riga ghetto: “Yiddin, schreibt un farschreibt” — “Jews, write it all
down.”
Many felt an overpowering need to preserve the truth. “Countless victims
became chroniclers and historians in the ghettos, even in the death camps,”
said Wiesel. “[They] left behind extraordinary documents. To testify became
an obsession. They left us poems and letters, diaries and fragments of
novels, some known throughout the world, others still unpublished.” And when
the war was over and the mind-boggling scope of the Final Solution was fully
grasped — the Germans and their collaborators had annihilated 6 million Jews
from every corner of Europe, wiping out more than one-third of the world’s
Jewish population — the moral imperative to remember grew even more intense.
Judaism has always attached intense significance to remembrance; in multiple
passages the Hebrew Bible even makes it an explicit religious obligation.
Not surprisingly, Israel’s parliament long ago added Yom Hashoah, or
Holocaust Remembrance Day, to the Jewish calendar each spring. (It begins
this year on Wednesday evening.) For many Holocaust survivors and their
children, “Never Forget” understandably became almost an 11th Commandment.
But a commitment to remembrance spread far beyond the community of those
most affected by the Nazis’ industrial-scale campaign to eradicate the Jews.
In recent decades, Holocaust commemoration, particularly in the West, became
a widespread cultural phenomenon. Countless books, lectures, and
documentaries have been devoted to the topic. Academia is replete with
Holocaust studies programs. On big and small screen alike, movies and
miniseries on Holocaust themes have been runaway successes. Online resources
for learning about the Holocaust are almost too numerous to count. And
Holocaust memorials and museums have been erected in cities large and small,
on every continent except Antarctica.
The Nazis’ extermination of European Jewry, an evil so unprecedented that
the word “genocide” had to be coined to describe it, is among the most
exhaustively researched, documented, and memorialized crimes of the 20th
century. The powerful Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, who in 1943
characterized the wholesale murder of the Jews, by then well underway, as “a
glorious page in our history that . . . shall never be written,” was wrong.
The history was written. Its remembrance is sustained by an ocean of
scholarship, testimony, literature, and education. The last living survivors
of the Holocaust are now mostly in their 80s or 90s. In a few years almost
no one will be left to speak from personal experience of what it meant to be
engulfed in the singular horror of the Shoah.
But the survivors have at least this reassurance: What happened to them will
not be forgotten.
Or will it?
The events of the Holocaust have haunted me for as long as I can remember.
My father, who was born in a tiny village on the Czechoslovak-Hungarian
border in 1925, is a survivor of Hitler’s destruction. With his parents and
four of his brothers and sisters, he was seized by the Nazis in the spring
of 1944, imprisoned in a crowded ghetto, and then, after six weeks, herded
into a cattle car to be transported to Auschwitz. Of the seven members of
his immediate family who entered the death camp, six were murdered. Only my
father escaped death.
For me, the Holocaust has always been intensely personal. It may have ended
a decade and a half before I was born, but I have always understood that I
was intended for obliteration too. In a Reichstag address in 1939, Hitler
had vowed to achieve “the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in
Europe.” The essence of the Final Solution is that it was to be final. No
Jews were to survive — above all, no Jewish children through whom 3,000
years of Jewish existence might continue. It was to that end that Germany
constructed such a vast continent-wide operation and committed such immense
financial resources: to track down and murder every last Jew in Europe.
Never before had a world power, deranged by anti-Semitism, made the
eradication of an entire people its central aim, or gone to such exhaustive
extremes to achieve it. That is what makes the Holocaust so grotesquely,
terrifyingly unique. The unexampled virulence of anti-Semitism, a hatred
older than and different from any other in human history, is at the heart of
what the Holocaust is about — that, and the role of the Jews as the canary
in the mine of civilization. When a society fills with toxic moral fumes,
Jews become the target of bigotry and terror. But rarely does it end with
them. Hitler set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was
in flames.
History is filled with terrible illustrations of the human capacity for
cruelty, hatred, and violence. In every era, there have been ruthless
tyrants willing to torture and kill in the pursuit of power and wealth. That
intolerance and racism unchecked can lead to barbaric crimes is a vital
lesson. But if there is no more to “Never Forget” than that, then Holocaust
remembrance must be judged a failure.
It was always inevitable that the enormity of the Holocaust would recede in
public awareness. The human mind is built to forget; neither individuals nor
societies can prevent the intensity of agonizing memories from diminishing
over time. In a new book, “In Praise of Forgetting,” David Rieff reflects on
King Philip’s War, a murderous conflict between English settlers and Indians
in 17th-century New England. On a per capita basis, it was the bloodiest war
in American history, and those who survived the carnage must surely have
been passionate in their conviction that it never be forgotten.
“And yet,” writes Rieff, “professional historians aside, King Philip’s War
is almost never talked about. . . . The historical importance of an event in
its own time and in the decades that follow offers no guarantee that it will
be remembered in the next century, let alone for many centuries after.”
Sooner or later — sooner, I fear, than later — the same fate will overtake
the Holocaust.
Like other terrible eruptions of savagery and slaughter, the Holocaust will
become, as it were, “ordinary” history. By now there is evidence aplenty
that it is already fading from common knowledge. In 2013, a survey of more
than 53,000 respondents in 101 countries found that only 54 percent of the
world’s adults had even heard of the Holocaust — and of those, one-third
belsieve it is either a myth or has been greatly exaggerated.
Dispiriting as those numbers are, they are bound to grow even worse. As the
generation of Holocaust survivors passes away, as Holocaust-deniers spread
their poison, as indifference to history takes its inevitable toll,
remembrance of the Nazis’ Jewish genocide will dissipate.
More and more, Holocaust terminology and imagery will be trivialized.
Indeed, the words and pictures have for years been shockingly misused. In
its “Holocaust on your Plate” campaign, the animal-rights group PETA
explicitly likened Hitler’s millions of human victims to chickens
slaughtered for food. In Taiwan, giant images of Hitler, his arm raised in a
Nazi salute, were used to advertise space heaters. In a TV broadcast, the
evangelical preacher Pat Robertson insisted that “what Nazi Germany did to
the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to evangelical Christians . . . .
It’s no different, it’s the same thing.”
For a few decades after World War II, the sheer monstrousness of the
Holocaust made it unthinkable as a subject for jokes. But that, too, has
gone by the boards, along with the brief postwar taboo that banished rank
anti-Semitism from polite society. Now Holocaust jokes proliferate.
“Tasteless and mean-spirited, some of these have become part of the
repertoire of popular stand-up comedians,” writes Alvin Rosenfeld, a scholar
at Indiana University. “By ridiculing and mocking Jewish suffering, comics
like France’s Dieudonné, Norway’s Otto Jespersen, Ireland’s Tommy Tiernan ,
and their counterparts in other countries look to laugh away Hitler’s Jewish
victims by deriding them.”
The world’s conscience was shocked, after the fact, by the scope and
ferocity of the Holocaust. In the face of such monumental evil, “Never
Forget,” like “Never Again,” may have seemed the only possible decent
response. “After the war,” Elie Wiesel said, “we reassured ourselves that it
would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka . . . to shake
humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever
again.”
But it wasn’t. Accounts of what was done in Treblinka did not prevent mass
murder in Cambodia or Bosnia or Rwanda. Holocaust remembrance has not
inoculated human beings against treating other human beings with brutality.
Museums and films and college courses about the Shoah have not made genocide
unthinkable — not even another Jewish genocide, as the regimes in Iran and
Gaza frequently make clear.
Holocaust remembrance has not prevented the onset of Holocaust
forgetfulness.
For survivors like my father, and for the sons and daughters they raised, it
goes without saying that “Never Forget” remains an ineradicable moral
imperative. I have always taken the Holocaust personally, and always will.
But the world, I know, will not. Eventually, everything is forgotten. Even
the worst crime in history.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at ***@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter
@jeff_jacoby.
JEFF JACOBY
‘Never forget,’ the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting
By Jeff Jacoby GLOBE COLUMNIST MAY 01, 2016
LONG BEFORE THE Holocaust had run its course, there was already a desperate
urge to keep it from being forgotten. In hiding and on the run, amid the
shadows of gas chambers and the smoke of crematoria, Jews frantically sought
ways to bear witness to the enormities of the Nazis. Surrounded by horror,
anticipating their own deaths, they appealed to the future: Remember.
In his Nobel Prize lecture in 1986, Elie Wiesel recalled the eminent
historian Simon Dubnow, who over and over implored his fellow inhabitants in
the Riga ghetto: “Yiddin, schreibt un farschreibt” — “Jews, write it all
down.”
Many felt an overpowering need to preserve the truth. “Countless victims
became chroniclers and historians in the ghettos, even in the death camps,”
said Wiesel. “[They] left behind extraordinary documents. To testify became
an obsession. They left us poems and letters, diaries and fragments of
novels, some known throughout the world, others still unpublished.” And when
the war was over and the mind-boggling scope of the Final Solution was fully
grasped — the Germans and their collaborators had annihilated 6 million Jews
from every corner of Europe, wiping out more than one-third of the world’s
Jewish population — the moral imperative to remember grew even more intense.
Judaism has always attached intense significance to remembrance; in multiple
passages the Hebrew Bible even makes it an explicit religious obligation.
Not surprisingly, Israel’s parliament long ago added Yom Hashoah, or
Holocaust Remembrance Day, to the Jewish calendar each spring. (It begins
this year on Wednesday evening.) For many Holocaust survivors and their
children, “Never Forget” understandably became almost an 11th Commandment.
But a commitment to remembrance spread far beyond the community of those
most affected by the Nazis’ industrial-scale campaign to eradicate the Jews.
In recent decades, Holocaust commemoration, particularly in the West, became
a widespread cultural phenomenon. Countless books, lectures, and
documentaries have been devoted to the topic. Academia is replete with
Holocaust studies programs. On big and small screen alike, movies and
miniseries on Holocaust themes have been runaway successes. Online resources
for learning about the Holocaust are almost too numerous to count. And
Holocaust memorials and museums have been erected in cities large and small,
on every continent except Antarctica.
The Nazis’ extermination of European Jewry, an evil so unprecedented that
the word “genocide” had to be coined to describe it, is among the most
exhaustively researched, documented, and memorialized crimes of the 20th
century. The powerful Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, who in 1943
characterized the wholesale murder of the Jews, by then well underway, as “a
glorious page in our history that . . . shall never be written,” was wrong.
The history was written. Its remembrance is sustained by an ocean of
scholarship, testimony, literature, and education. The last living survivors
of the Holocaust are now mostly in their 80s or 90s. In a few years almost
no one will be left to speak from personal experience of what it meant to be
engulfed in the singular horror of the Shoah.
But the survivors have at least this reassurance: What happened to them will
not be forgotten.
Or will it?
The events of the Holocaust have haunted me for as long as I can remember.
My father, who was born in a tiny village on the Czechoslovak-Hungarian
border in 1925, is a survivor of Hitler’s destruction. With his parents and
four of his brothers and sisters, he was seized by the Nazis in the spring
of 1944, imprisoned in a crowded ghetto, and then, after six weeks, herded
into a cattle car to be transported to Auschwitz. Of the seven members of
his immediate family who entered the death camp, six were murdered. Only my
father escaped death.
For me, the Holocaust has always been intensely personal. It may have ended
a decade and a half before I was born, but I have always understood that I
was intended for obliteration too. In a Reichstag address in 1939, Hitler
had vowed to achieve “the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in
Europe.” The essence of the Final Solution is that it was to be final. No
Jews were to survive — above all, no Jewish children through whom 3,000
years of Jewish existence might continue. It was to that end that Germany
constructed such a vast continent-wide operation and committed such immense
financial resources: to track down and murder every last Jew in Europe.
Never before had a world power, deranged by anti-Semitism, made the
eradication of an entire people its central aim, or gone to such exhaustive
extremes to achieve it. That is what makes the Holocaust so grotesquely,
terrifyingly unique. The unexampled virulence of anti-Semitism, a hatred
older than and different from any other in human history, is at the heart of
what the Holocaust is about — that, and the role of the Jews as the canary
in the mine of civilization. When a society fills with toxic moral fumes,
Jews become the target of bigotry and terror. But rarely does it end with
them. Hitler set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was
in flames.
History is filled with terrible illustrations of the human capacity for
cruelty, hatred, and violence. In every era, there have been ruthless
tyrants willing to torture and kill in the pursuit of power and wealth. That
intolerance and racism unchecked can lead to barbaric crimes is a vital
lesson. But if there is no more to “Never Forget” than that, then Holocaust
remembrance must be judged a failure.
It was always inevitable that the enormity of the Holocaust would recede in
public awareness. The human mind is built to forget; neither individuals nor
societies can prevent the intensity of agonizing memories from diminishing
over time. In a new book, “In Praise of Forgetting,” David Rieff reflects on
King Philip’s War, a murderous conflict between English settlers and Indians
in 17th-century New England. On a per capita basis, it was the bloodiest war
in American history, and those who survived the carnage must surely have
been passionate in their conviction that it never be forgotten.
“And yet,” writes Rieff, “professional historians aside, King Philip’s War
is almost never talked about. . . . The historical importance of an event in
its own time and in the decades that follow offers no guarantee that it will
be remembered in the next century, let alone for many centuries after.”
Sooner or later — sooner, I fear, than later — the same fate will overtake
the Holocaust.
Like other terrible eruptions of savagery and slaughter, the Holocaust will
become, as it were, “ordinary” history. By now there is evidence aplenty
that it is already fading from common knowledge. In 2013, a survey of more
than 53,000 respondents in 101 countries found that only 54 percent of the
world’s adults had even heard of the Holocaust — and of those, one-third
belsieve it is either a myth or has been greatly exaggerated.
Dispiriting as those numbers are, they are bound to grow even worse. As the
generation of Holocaust survivors passes away, as Holocaust-deniers spread
their poison, as indifference to history takes its inevitable toll,
remembrance of the Nazis’ Jewish genocide will dissipate.
More and more, Holocaust terminology and imagery will be trivialized.
Indeed, the words and pictures have for years been shockingly misused. In
its “Holocaust on your Plate” campaign, the animal-rights group PETA
explicitly likened Hitler’s millions of human victims to chickens
slaughtered for food. In Taiwan, giant images of Hitler, his arm raised in a
Nazi salute, were used to advertise space heaters. In a TV broadcast, the
evangelical preacher Pat Robertson insisted that “what Nazi Germany did to
the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to evangelical Christians . . . .
It’s no different, it’s the same thing.”
For a few decades after World War II, the sheer monstrousness of the
Holocaust made it unthinkable as a subject for jokes. But that, too, has
gone by the boards, along with the brief postwar taboo that banished rank
anti-Semitism from polite society. Now Holocaust jokes proliferate.
“Tasteless and mean-spirited, some of these have become part of the
repertoire of popular stand-up comedians,” writes Alvin Rosenfeld, a scholar
at Indiana University. “By ridiculing and mocking Jewish suffering, comics
like France’s Dieudonné, Norway’s Otto Jespersen, Ireland’s Tommy Tiernan ,
and their counterparts in other countries look to laugh away Hitler’s Jewish
victims by deriding them.”
The world’s conscience was shocked, after the fact, by the scope and
ferocity of the Holocaust. In the face of such monumental evil, “Never
Forget,” like “Never Again,” may have seemed the only possible decent
response. “After the war,” Elie Wiesel said, “we reassured ourselves that it
would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka . . . to shake
humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever
again.”
But it wasn’t. Accounts of what was done in Treblinka did not prevent mass
murder in Cambodia or Bosnia or Rwanda. Holocaust remembrance has not
inoculated human beings against treating other human beings with brutality.
Museums and films and college courses about the Shoah have not made genocide
unthinkable — not even another Jewish genocide, as the regimes in Iran and
Gaza frequently make clear.
Holocaust remembrance has not prevented the onset of Holocaust
forgetfulness.
For survivors like my father, and for the sons and daughters they raised, it
goes without saying that “Never Forget” remains an ineradicable moral
imperative. I have always taken the Holocaust personally, and always will.
But the world, I know, will not. Eventually, everything is forgotten. Even
the worst crime in history.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at ***@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter
@jeff_jacoby.