Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘yom hashoah series’

I must apologize. I posted for the five days leading up to today, but couldn’t find the time during the day to post on the actual day. Strange, isn’t it? I found the time to watch the hockey game, but not to write about the six million. What does that say about me?

But today was Yom Ha’Shoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day. See Lynn and Imshin for some poignant reflections. And while you’re at it, pay a visit to the Yad Vashem website and see some of the exhibits currently showing in the museum.

Never Forget.

A Jerusalem Post editorial asks the question. The big question. Really, the only question: what has humanity learned from the Holocaust?

Jews have been tireless in using the Holocaust to teach about man’s inhumanity to man. Has it made a difference? Ask the 1.7 million Cambodians slaughtered between 1975-1979 by communist lunatics. Ask the over 800,000 Rwandans cut down by machetes — in a mere 100 days — in 1994.

Clearly, efforts to universalize the lessons of the Holocaust have utterly failed. Would a forced visit of Hutu killers through Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum saved a single Tutsi?

No one predisposed to genocide will be shamed into human decency by exposure to Schindler’s List. More than that: Even humanists who mourn Hitler’s Jewish victims have, in the blink of a relativist eye, condemned Israel for eliminating Ahmed Yassin, though he was single-mindedly committed to a new genocide.

[ . . . ]

We are loathe to equate today’s foes with the Nazis. But as Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer has argued, “Nazism, Stalinist communism, and radical Islam are different from each other, but they also have a certain similarity: All three aim, or aimed, at exclusive control over the world, all three oppose or opposed all expressions of democracy, and all three attacked Jews…” On this day, it is worth remembering that in Mein Kampf Hitler predicted terrorism and force would be victorious over reason.

The battle continues.

To that, we can add the Armenian Genocide, the hundreds of thousands (or more) killed in the Congo, the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, and the thousands of North Korean “political prisoners” being subjected to untold horrors in the Gulags. These are, sadly, only a few examples.

Was it realistic to say “Never Again” after the Holocaust? How could it be, when millions of years of human history teach us that the one thing human beings keep doing is finding new ways to instill horror and cruelty on one another? How could we think that the Holocaust would scare humanity straight, when it was only the “next step” in a long line of massacres, wars, and the wiping out of entire peoples?

There’s still an emotional connection to the Holocaust today. The events of 50 or 60 years ago are close enough in time that there are still survivors to tell their tales, to share their pain and to remind us. There are still memorials standing where the death camps once were. We can visit them, witness them.

But how long until the Holocaust becomes just another dry chapter in a history textbook, too remote in time for emotion? How long until future generations talk about it with the same detachment as they do the Crusades, or the Roman conquest?

Never.

Because maybe we haven’t learned. We haven’t figured out “Never Again” and perhaps we never will. But we have figured out Never Forget.

We haven’t forgotten the events of two or three thousand years ago. We’ve been observing holidays, retelling stories and prayers, tearing our clothing on Tisha B’Av and reciting the story of the Exodus on Passover. We weep over events of two thousand years ago with the same emotion as though they happened yesterday.

If there’s one thing us Jews have, it’s a very long collective memory. It unites us as a people as we remember the chapters of our shared history.

And if it hasn’t ensured a “Never Again”, then we have at least ensured that we will “Never Forget”. Maybe it’s a first step.

One year ago, Meryl posted a very appropriate Yom Ha’Shoah discussion, in which she pointed out that in 1933 in Germany, the Jews were encouraged not to draw attention to themselves so as to avoid being harassed:

From The Testimony of Lucille Eichengruen:

Interviewer: What happened after 1933?

Answer: In 1933 the climate changed. There were restrictions, there were ugly incidents – we walked to school, children would beat us up. Children would yell at us and make nasty remarks. We were told to be quiet on the streetcar. We were told not to draw attention to ourselves, and slowly and gradually people began to leave. Students, teachers – it was a very unsettled situation. It was constant turmoil and for a child it was not conducive to learning.

“We were told not to draw attention to ourselves.” It’s what Jews used to do. It’s what Jews had to do. It’s what the world was used to Jews doing. That’s why the German police told its Jewish population to stop wearing any outward signs of Judaism so they wouldn’t be attacked by thugs — last year. It’s one of the attitudes that got six million of us slaughtered then, and countless thousands more murdered over the centuries.

We don’t keep our heads down anymore. We won’t.

The Nazis didn’t want the Jews to draw any positive attention… but they encouraged negative attention. Which is why they imposed the yellow star armband or patch. They wanted the Jews to keep their heads down – but to be easily identifiable for humiliation and harassment.

The yellow star was a symbol of shame and fear. But the outward symbols of Judaism that many Jews wear today – kippot, magen david or “chai” necklaces or even souvenir t-shirts from Israel with IDF logos or Hebrew lettering – are anything but. They’re symbols of pride. They’re saying, you can’t label us because we’re proud to advertise who and what we are!

I wear my magen david necklace all the time. (These days I also wear an Israel flag pin on my jacket lapel.) But even I removed my necklace before going touring around Europe. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to risk breaking or losing it – same as the other jewellery I left at home. But if truth be told, I was also a little nervous about travelling with the star of david around my neck through the same countries that forced their Jews to wear yellow stars only a few short decades ago. I’m not proud of that. Far from it. But I didn’t want to ask for trouble either.

Now it’s two years later, and if I had to do it again I’d probably wear the star. Because I’ve learned that sometimes you have to wear your colours with pride, in order to let the world know that you will never again allow them to make you wear their colours with shame.

It’s been the subject of books, TV movies, and has become the stuff of legends. The fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto have gone down in history as the most identifiable group of Jews in the Holocaust (besides the Partisans) who didn’t go to their deaths quietly, but who rose up against Nazi tyranny and fought back.

Symbolism, of course, was all that the uprising created. There are next to no survivors from those who fought. It took years of starvation rations, slave labour, and ghetto “liquidations” before a handful got together the spirit to even launch a fight. And they knew at the time that they were signing their death warrants. But it didn’t matter, because they knew they were dead anyway.

But it would be wrong to assume that there is anything less heroic about those who did not participate… those who lived in other ghettos, or were rounded up and shipped to death camps… those whose small acts of heroism sometimes allowed them or their loved ones to survive – even if only for one more day.

The Jewish Virtual Library chronicles the amazing story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which has gone down in history as a symbol of resistance to tyranny despite insurmountable odds.

Today’s headlines are screaming the disturbing news of a Palestinian bomb plot at the opening of a new Hungarian Holocaust Museum. Israeli President Moshe Katsav is scheduled to attend this monumental event, which, presumably, is the terrorist’s excuse for trying to attack it:

Police arrested the spiritual leader of a small Islamic community in Budapest Tuesday during a visit President Moshe Katsav and suggested he was planning to bomb the city’s Jewish museum. Two Syrians also were detained on related charges.

[ . . . ]

Police identified the suspect as a 42-year-old dentist of “Palestine origin” and said he was the spiritual leader of a small Islamic community in Budapest. He is a naturalized Hungarian citizen.

The suspect, whose name was not released, was charged with being involved in “preparation for a terrorist attack,” said Police Lt. Col. Attila Petofi.

The irony of this couldn’t possibly be clearer.

With all the extra attention being called to this inauguration, the spotlight has fallen on Hungary’s chapter in the terrible events of the Holocaust. This year is the 60th anniversary of the deportation of nearly all of Hungarian Jews – who numbered over 600,000 – to ghettos, slave labor, and death. Few survived to tell the story.

Hungary was under Nazi occupation, which has allowed a sort of absolving of any kind of feeling of collective guilt in subsequent years. The fact that Hungary fell under another tyrannical regime – this time Soviet – after the war even further served to allow people to distance themselves from their past. Because surely Hungary suffered under both Nazism and Communism. But, as the new Holocaust Center’s spokesman, Balint Molnar, says, this doesn’t tell the whole story:

“For 60 years, there has been no debate about the responsibility of Hungarian society for the Holocaust. Under communism, everything was blamed on the Germans and a handful of Hungarian extremists. There was no discussion over the role of the wartime Hungarian authorities, the lack of resistance and the wholesale looting of Jewish property.

“The Holocaust in Hungary was not the private tragedy of the Jews,” he said. “It is part of Hungarian history, as much as the revolutions of 1848 or 1956. Even now it is hard to comprehend the profound damage that has been done to Hungarian society.”

The fact is, the vast majority of the Hungarian people stood silently by as the Jews were shipped off to slaughter. Many actively participated and helped the Nazis. There was, after all, a Hungarian branch of the Nazi party. The Holocaust wouldn’t have been possible without the help or at least tacit acceptance of the populations of the countries in which it took place.

One of my great-grandmothers was Hungarian Jewish. Her family came to Canada and, because of that, my grandfather was lucky enough to be born here. So instead of being caught up by the war, he attended high school here in Montreal, got married, had kids, went on to be an accountant and found a company, retire, get a condo in Florida, and play a lot of golf. I can hardly even contemplate what would have happened if his mother stayed put in Hungary. I’m sure he can’t either.

Hungary’s role in the Holocaust isn’t a new research topic for world historians and interested parties. It’s been studied and written about extensively. The US Holocaust Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies even held a symposium back in 1999 to examine Hungary’s role in the Holocaust in more detail. You can listen to some of the talks online. But for Hungary as a country, the opening of the museum – the first such memorial ever in Budapest – is an important milestone. It speaks volumes about the country’s willingness to finally come to terms with its past.

And the attempt to bomb it speaks volumes about the challenges the world’s Jews are still facing today.

LGF posted a letter written by Fred Friendly, a US master sergeant in 1945, who later went on to become president of CBS news, about what he saw when he liberated Mauthausen Concentration Camp:

Mauthausen was built with a half-million rocks which 150,000 prisoners – 18,000 was the capacity – carried up on their backs from a quarry 800 feet below. They carried it up steps so steep that a Captain and I walked it once and were winded, without a load. They carried granite and made 8 trips a day… and if they stumbled, the S.S. men pushed them into the quarry. There are 285 steps, covered with blood. They called it the steps of death. I saw the shower room (twice or three times the size of our bathroom), a chamber lined with tile and topped with sprinklers where 150 prisoners at a time were disrobed and ordered in for a shower which never gushed forth from the sprinklers because the chemical was gas. When they ran out of gas, they merely sucked all of the air out of the room. I talked to the Jews who worked in the crematory, one room adjacent, where six and seven bodies at a time were burned. They gave these jobs to the Jews because they all died anyhow, and they didn’t want the rest of the prisoners to know their own fate. The Jews knew theirs, you see.

[ . . . ]

This is my Mauthausen letter. I hope you will see fit to let Bill Braude and the folks read it. I would like to think that all the Wachenheimers and all the Friendlys and all our good Providence friends would read it. Then I want you to put it away and every Yom Kippur I want you to take it out and make your grandchildren read it.

For, if there had been no America, we, all of us, might well have carried granite at Mauthausen.

I hate to post only an excerpt. Read the whole thing.

Yom Ha’Shoah is in six days. This letter made me think of something I want to do on this site. For the next six days, starting today (six to symbolize the six million), I want to post some sort of story or account to remember the Shoah. Today, thanks to seeing this letter, the story is Mauthausen.

Almost two years ago, on my tour of Europe, I visited the remains of the camp. They’ve turned it into a museum, you see. A museum of death, for us tourists to stop off at in between the beer hall and the white water rafting. Just another tourist attraction.

I had been learning about the Holocaust for nearly my entire life. I heard firsthand accounts from survivors, read books, saw films, went to Yad Vashem and to the Holocaust Museum in Washington… but nothing prepared me for that experience. I hadn’t been before. Not on the March of the Living or on any of the trips that took groups to Poland or Germany or Hungary or the Czech Republic to bear witness. No, there was just this one experience and it caught me completely off guard.

That day, I wrote pages and pages in my journal. I couldn’t stop writing, even for hours afterwards. Every impression. Every detail.

And I also took photos. I debated long and hard about that one. On the one hand, it seemed almost disrespectful to walk around with a camera taking snapshots. But then I realized it was probably the most appropriate thing I could do. To take photos. To write. To see it for myself and to show the photos to as many people as possible as if to say, here, here is proof that these horrors and atrocities happened and the more people who record witness accounts or take and publish photos or write about it or make films about it, the more the world remembers and the better we can counter the propagandists and antisemites who would claim otherwise.

So here are the photos that I took that day. I have a hard time looking at them myself. And these were of the memorials… taken nearly 60 years after the camp was liberated. But I still have a hard time looking at them. And I don’t know if you will want to either. But it’s important to witness, to remember.

Because my sentiment after walking out of the gates of Mauthausen – walking, you understand, free as a bird and getting on a bus and moving along to the next stop of our tour – was the same as Fred Friendly’s: It could have been me.