Remember - יזכור

[eumelia]

Sometimes I think about the Holocaust, and especially today I do because it is Holocaust Remembrance Day; the public television networks are showing documentaries, the radio is playing dirges and at ten AM a siren, the siren used for air raids and times of emergency and war, was heard, stopping everything – traffic, exams, fights, classes, shopping – creating an ear piercing moment of silence that continued to ring in my ears for a few more moments.
It is surreal, to see the stillness while your brain is screaming that the noise is painful. It forces you to remember what today means and why we must never forget it.

In Israel, we use the word "Shoah" (שואה, eng. Holocaust) lightly, at least in my circle of cynical friends; "This exam is going to be a holocaust" – "המבחן הזה הולך להיות שואתי". We make jokes about German Sheppard's (Alsatian dogs, ya know) in Jewish ghettos and ask how many Jews you can get into one car – one in the boot, two in the front, three in the back and the rest in the ashtray.
Morbid, which is putting it lightly.
I don't know how other nations that have gone through genocide handle the memory.
Do they also make jokes?
Do they go on school trips to Poland to see where our families were murdered, where their hair was shorn and used to make water proof socks and their fat was used to make soap (everything you saw/read in "Fight Club" is true).

I don't think it's the magnitude of death that makes the Holocaust unique as genocides go.
I think it was the industrial-ness of it, the careful methodical planning of it all. The loss not only of life but of an entire culture that had been cultivated over centuries. The pornographically photographed naked women, children and men; dying, dead and piled up in heaps, each body indistinguishable from the next.
Nudity takes away individuality.
The numbering of the people, which took away a little bit more of their humanity in the eyes of the perpetrators; the lies that hid the material reality: "You'll be getting your luggage back soon" a smiling Nazi clerk would say and everything was catalogued in that meticulous bureaucracy the Germans would pride themselves in.

My own opinion on the genocide that massacred the branches of my family on both sides has changed over the years - Those that went on to create what is now my quite large family, who live around the world, left Latvia and Lithuania before Operation Barbarossa, indeed before WWII even began.

It's easy to succumb to the idea that Jews are eternal victims and that the Holocaust was the largest and latest of Pogroms. At the same time, there is the fact that from this incident of violence a new kind of Jew arose, one that is strong, stronger than ever before, with a country of his own and an army that is the strongest in the Middle East. It is with this new strength and army, the Jews will never fear for our existence again.

I'm pretty sure Israeli Jews are the only majority population in the world that fears for its continued existence, not "way of life", but actual life. It is for good reason; Jews are surrounded by nations who don't want us here (when are we ever "wanted" any where).
I always think it's ironic that we went from one ghetto to another, only this time we built the walls, the snipers are ours and we pushed those we didn't want out.
The Holocaust brought about the existence of Israel, it probably would have happened at some point, but the genocide of the Jews made the process that much more urgent, that much faster.

Israel was built to be a home for those who became homeless.
*sigh*

The conclusion Jews and Israelis in particular, must take from our tragedy, is that we must strive to be better than we were.
Than we are.
We must strive to create a country, a world, in which persecution, racism, antisemitism, orientalism, genocide, auto-genocide are History and not reality.

That's my conclusion as an Israeli Jewish girl and that's what I derive from the Holocaust and that's why I make sure to remember, remember and never ever forget.

.לזכור, לזכור ולא לשכוח לעולם

Remember - יזכור:
The Jews
The Palestinians
The Bosnians
The Darfurians
The Rwandans
The Aborigines of Australia and Tasmania
The Cambodians
The Tibetans
The Armenians
The West African Slaves
The Original/First/Native Nations of the Americas
The "Witches"
The Inquisition
There are more, many more, too many. Who else must we remember?

Comments

[qilora.livejournal.com]

i love you. and i promise, i won't forget.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

I don't forget, and where I live, it was white people like me murdering Aboriginal people. All over Victoria there are weird areas with absolutely no Aborigines at all, then just a town over, there will be a whole community. My home town is one of those dead patches, and very old women remember being told by their grandparents that they drove all the Aboriginal people over a certain cliff. That cliff is now on a major tourist route, but is not acknowledged because there is no written evidence. Still, people have not forgotten, and sites of local massacres are slowly being acknowledged, as are sacred places.

[warlordkittens.livejournal.com]

Amalek.

[aesiron.livejournal.com]

I'm not Jewish and you're the only Jew I'm aware of knowing, either culturally or religiously, but two favorite jokes are actually Holocaust jokes and one of them is the "How many Jews can you fit in a Bug" one. It's in very bad taste but I just find them really funny.

I don't know if I had a point to that other than just feeling like I should admit it.

[stateofwonder.livejournal.com]

As in Australia, Canada and the US, indigenous peoples all over the world have been subject to genocide. It's frightening to me how common the desire of the dominant cultural group to exterminate minority groups seems to be. But I agree with you, no genocide that I'm aware of was as creepily systematic as the Holocaust.

I've never heard any jokes about the Rwandan genocide, but then again I haven't been to Rwanda yet, only neighbouring countries. It might also be a bit fresh to joke about now.

my response

[(Anonymous)]

is kudos,Mel, for a well written statement.

Please don't forget the wandering Gypsies
The Russian and Chinese people slaughtered during those awful times
the children and people of Hiroshima

so many...so many....

genocide comes in so many forms

and the mourning for every single life lost, every butterfly that was never seen behind the walls of a ghetto