Not forgetting

[shewhomust]

January 27th is International Holocaust Memorial Day; the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was chosen as a day to remember those who died at the hands of the Nazis, and to affirm, in the face of those who still deny it, that the Holocaust really happened, and that it was a crime whose size and cruelty make it outstanding among the many terrible things human beings have done to each other.

I remember the Holocaust; which is to say, of course, that I don't remember the Holocaust. It happened before I was born, and it did not happen to my family; my Jewish grandparents were both born in England. And it is too huge, and too terrible, to remember: the mind slides off, slides away from the ungraspable reality. Occasionally some detail - a single image, one person's story - shines a light onto one tiny area of what happened. Or a memorial - like Imre Varga's Holocaust Memorial in Budapest, the great silver tree whose every leaf carries a name - shapes an image that the imagination can latch on to. All year round, not just on one day, there are reminders of the Holocaust, and all it did to shape my world. And that's as it should be, because if the Holocaust is something unbearable to remember, it is not something I'd want to forget.

This impossibility of either remembering or forgetting is one reason why I'm ambivalent about setting aside a designated memorial day. Then come another tangle of arguments around the uniqueness, or otherwise, of The Holocaust (capitalised) compared to all other holocausts. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has added the slaughter in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur to its remit - and there has been pressure to add, for example, the massacre of the Armenians. I would not want the job of weighing up the competing claims - how can you measure and compare tragedies on this scale? It's like arguing about who has the larger infinity. So yes, perhaps it's right to widen the scope of the day's remembrances to a consideration of how abominably people have treated each other in the past, and how it came about, what were the steps that led down into the abyss.

I wasn't planning to post about Holocaust Memorial Day - all this disorganised emotion and conflicting ideas doesn't make for a great post. Not to mention a profound uneasiness at the way the Israeli remembrance of the Holocaust feeds into a self image which allows the state of Israel to feel justified in - well, not to mention that. But two things - two trivial things - made me chage my mind.

The first is that the Graphic Novels Reading Group to which I belong was asked to participate in an exercise run by the City Council, in which various reading groups would choose a book they could relate to the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day - and that theme was not 'Remember the Holocaust' but 'Stand up to Hatred'. It was suggested to us that the book we might appropriately read was, explicitly, not Maus, but Persepolis. For various reasons, this message came through to us third-hand, so I don't know what the reasoning was behind it. I suppose if what you're interested in is standing up to hatred, or at least to bullies and religious repression, then Persepolis illustrates that theme (though it also demonstrates that if you do stand up to these things, there will be a price to pay in executed uncles and personal exile - but I digress). But the Holocaust? No.

Then this afternoon I had an anguished phone call from a friend: had I seen tonight's programme at the Tyneside Cinema? Showing tonight, Andrej Wajda's Katyn, "an Oscar-nominated masterpiece which explores the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish army officers and the intellectual elite of Polish society by Soviet forces, one of the most disgraceful atrocities of World War II". A week today they will show The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, which is more strictly relevant. Both showings are being sponsored by Made in Poland (this seems to mean that tickets are subsidised). My friend is a Wajda fan, and rather fancied seeing the film, but she was very upset that the programme explicitly offered to express and shape our remembrance of the Holocaust should place the Katyn massacre not on a level with, but ahead of, the deaths of six million Jews. Considering how much of the killing machine was built in Poland, the context gives the innocuous phrase 'Made in Poland' a bitter flavour.

So that's two of us distressed and angry at the invitation to observe Holocaust Memorial Day by forgetting about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust.

Of course, meanwhile on LJ, Lewis Carrol's birthday is observed with Rabbit Hole Day - and very nice, too! sartorias is your guide (and don't miss her own contribution!).

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this.

It's odd for me to think of today as a Holocaust Memorial Day, since I tend to observe Yom Ha-Shoah in the spring.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was quite surprised to find that this was not purely a date observed in the UK.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I did not know it was Holocaust Memorial Day.

I tend to think about these things around the various war memorials, also during the High Holy Days.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I would not have know, if the issue had not been raised in my reading group. I'm absolutely not criticising anyone - as I say, I was quite reluctant to post about it myself.

[kythiaranos.livejournal.com]

When I went to the Soviet Union in high school, one of our stops was at the site of a concentration camp in Riga, outside Tallinn. That was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had in my travels. No matter how many times I'd heard the numbers, it didn't really hit home until I stood on that haunted ground. It's heartbreaking.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yes; we can teach it and teach it, but what makes it real is personal for each of us.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the discussions about the Holocaust Memorial Monument, here in Berlin.
I had no idea, there was such a day as you describe, actually and have my similar doubts about the making of a special day for remembering it by.
To me, Holocaust is present in a realm definitely not restricted to one particular day.
When I first moved to Berlin we took a tourist busride first week, to get to know how the city is built largely and see some major sites, that way, just for starters.
When we came to pass the Holocaust Memorial Monument, this guide chirped into her microphone: "look at those grey cubes, that is supposed to be a monument". I wondered how she got her job and did not applaud when she finished, after having remarked something or other (never could shut up).

The Holocaust Memorial Monument in Berlin actually is excellent to my understanding, in so far that it is like a landscape covering a field and you have to go into it, walking the narrow alleys inbetween huge, dark non-cubic stones, symbolising the millions who were murdered, and standing or walking inside there, it is very effective indeed.
To me, it hints at the unspeakable and touches one, makes one think about it on several levels. A Holocaust Memorial Day seems to restrict the process instead of the opposite.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read about that memorial (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/jan/26/architecture) (and wrote about it, too (http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/109330.html), sort of). It does sound impressive.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Very well put, am sorry I can´t express myself quite that well in engrish.

But indeed: "what an odd species we are"...

Katyn

[(Anonymous)]

I am that anxious friend who rang you yesterday and was upset about the screening of Katyn as part of Holocaust Memorial day. I agree however much we stretch the idea of the Holocaust if we include all the atrocities which have been committed by human beings against each other we blur the issues to such a point that we get entirely confused. Putting the sufferings of people all on the same level is a kind of blindness to the conditions in which they took place. Nazis and resisters , Spanish Republicans or supporters of Franco. All have blood on their hands but would we really put them in the same "bag" so to speak? I think it is a lazy way of dealing with life and death situations and if we don't want other holocausts to happen we need to examine carefully the one which the Jews have been the victims of, to be fully aware of our responsiblities. The wishy washiness and lack of proper definitions leads to a very dangerous road.