shewhomust | Not forgetting

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!