Death, Remember there was a lot of it
Apr. 20th, 2009 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eumeliaIt's the eve of the National Day of Remembrance and Heroism of the Holocaust.
Personally, ever since I was a teenager I've disliked the municipal and school ceremonies. More specifically, ever since I returned from a school trip to Poland in which we travelled through Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, Bialystock, Lublin Ghetto, Majdanek, Kradow Ghetto, Plashow, Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birekenau and various forests in which bodies are buried in mass graves.
On teevee there is an Israeli made documentary about the Bielsky Brothers, the new Hollywood War-Action film Defiance is based on their story.
I'd really like to see the movie, as I can't recall a WWII movie in which the Jewish Partisans were the heroes and not a side anecdote that existed along side the Jewish victims.
I find the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust problematic.
During the travelling with my school mates and my mother in Poland, we had memorial ceremonies at each of the sites that were the concentration and death camps.
At the time, I remember being overwhelmed by everything.
I remember joking around with the other kids (we were 16-17) and I don't know if everyone was actually aware of what we were doing there.
I remember thinking "why haven't I cried yet?".
Because I didn't.
Cry, that is.
Biggest cry baby in the world, walking around the place I was told my people had been massacred and I just felt numb.
It was only when we got to Birekenau (about two days before we were set to go home) and we walked around through the (in)famous gate "Arbeit Macht Frei" - "Work Shall Set You Free".
The Nazis sure had a twisted funny bone.
I walked around the Blocks (the big red brick houses that were used for different uses) and I decided to explore the very famous Block 10 - that would be Josef Mengele's facility.
It was most likely the heat (we travelled in July) and the smallness of the hallways and the fact that throughout my childhood Josef Mengele was a bit of a Monster Under The Bed kind of figure, but with quite a bit of force I was struck by the enormity of what had actually happened in that place. And in all the other places I had been to that week.
I ran out of the Block and cried like the baby I am to Mummy who went on to tell me that her father's family (he died when she was young and I never got to know my maternal grandfather) were all exterminated - he had immigrated to South Africa in the early 30's, saving his life.
I did not travel to Poland in a vacuum, obviously. In my mind I had the annual ceremonies I sat through as a child and teen, I had Schindler's List, Escape from Sobibor, War and Remembrance (the scene in which they bring the people to the gas chambers, just thinking about it, makes me weepy) and all those other "clean" images.
As I mentioned, throughout the trip we had various memorial services at the sites of the and the Zionist connection was very much emphasised.
The various Zionist youth groups were part of the Jewish resistance and we were always hearing that today, because of Israel, this will never happen again.
Never again.
Never again.
Never again.
That's what we hear all the time.
Remember, remember and never forget.
We talk about the fact that a culture was lost, was destroyed.
We don't talk about the culture itself.
There is a Yiddish revival of a kind in Israel. As the Survivors are now very quietly disappearing and there will truly be no one to tell us what happened to them, perhaps us Israeli Jews are realising that we didn't actually come from nothing, that we had a home somewhere else once.
The Holocaust is very callously used to deflect any criticism of Israel. All our enemies are a "New-Hitler". Holocaust denial is a problem no doubt, but we are not the only people to have been persecuted and had genocide committed upon us.
The Holocaust, while being a part of Jewish history, doesn't actually belong to us... it belongs to the world.
To claim it as solely ours denied the history of other people.
I think the world in general has become callous to the Holocaust when movies like Valkyrie are produced along with Defiance.
Regardless, the way Israel uses the Holocaust is post-traumatic in the extreme and we nurture this post-trauma constantly by the split conciousness we have as both victims and no-longer-victims.
I feel that the lesson learned from the Holocaust is that humanity reached a point of creative destruction that should be examined - because I really think it was the scope and industrialism of the deaths that were committed - after all the Holocaust is hardly the first (or the last) genocide to have been perpetrated.
I can't help but finish this post with my own brand of funny:
Personally, ever since I was a teenager I've disliked the municipal and school ceremonies. More specifically, ever since I returned from a school trip to Poland in which we travelled through Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, Bialystock, Lublin Ghetto, Majdanek, Kradow Ghetto, Plashow, Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birekenau and various forests in which bodies are buried in mass graves.
On teevee there is an Israeli made documentary about the Bielsky Brothers, the new Hollywood War-Action film Defiance is based on their story.
I'd really like to see the movie, as I can't recall a WWII movie in which the Jewish Partisans were the heroes and not a side anecdote that existed along side the Jewish victims.
I find the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust problematic.
During the travelling with my school mates and my mother in Poland, we had memorial ceremonies at each of the sites that were the concentration and death camps.
At the time, I remember being overwhelmed by everything.
I remember joking around with the other kids (we were 16-17) and I don't know if everyone was actually aware of what we were doing there.
I remember thinking "why haven't I cried yet?".
Because I didn't.
Cry, that is.
Biggest cry baby in the world, walking around the place I was told my people had been massacred and I just felt numb.
It was only when we got to Birekenau (about two days before we were set to go home) and we walked around through the (in)famous gate "Arbeit Macht Frei" - "Work Shall Set You Free".
The Nazis sure had a twisted funny bone.
I walked around the Blocks (the big red brick houses that were used for different uses) and I decided to explore the very famous Block 10 - that would be Josef Mengele's facility.
It was most likely the heat (we travelled in July) and the smallness of the hallways and the fact that throughout my childhood Josef Mengele was a bit of a Monster Under The Bed kind of figure, but with quite a bit of force I was struck by the enormity of what had actually happened in that place. And in all the other places I had been to that week.
I ran out of the Block and cried like the baby I am to Mummy who went on to tell me that her father's family (he died when she was young and I never got to know my maternal grandfather) were all exterminated - he had immigrated to South Africa in the early 30's, saving his life.
I did not travel to Poland in a vacuum, obviously. In my mind I had the annual ceremonies I sat through as a child and teen, I had Schindler's List, Escape from Sobibor, War and Remembrance (the scene in which they bring the people to the gas chambers, just thinking about it, makes me weepy) and all those other "clean" images.
As I mentioned, throughout the trip we had various memorial services at the sites of the and the Zionist connection was very much emphasised.
The various Zionist youth groups were part of the Jewish resistance and we were always hearing that today, because of Israel, this will never happen again.
Never again.
Never again.
Never again.
That's what we hear all the time.
Remember, remember and never forget.
We talk about the fact that a culture was lost, was destroyed.
We don't talk about the culture itself.
There is a Yiddish revival of a kind in Israel. As the Survivors are now very quietly disappearing and there will truly be no one to tell us what happened to them, perhaps us Israeli Jews are realising that we didn't actually come from nothing, that we had a home somewhere else once.
The Holocaust is very callously used to deflect any criticism of Israel. All our enemies are a "New-Hitler". Holocaust denial is a problem no doubt, but we are not the only people to have been persecuted and had genocide committed upon us.
The Holocaust, while being a part of Jewish history, doesn't actually belong to us... it belongs to the world.
To claim it as solely ours denied the history of other people.
I think the world in general has become callous to the Holocaust when movies like Valkyrie are produced along with Defiance.
Regardless, the way Israel uses the Holocaust is post-traumatic in the extreme and we nurture this post-trauma constantly by the split conciousness we have as both victims and no-longer-victims.
I feel that the lesson learned from the Holocaust is that humanity reached a point of creative destruction that should be examined - because I really think it was the scope and industrialism of the deaths that were committed - after all the Holocaust is hardly the first (or the last) genocide to have been perpetrated.
I can't help but finish this post with my own brand of funny:
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-20 09:15 pm (UTC)It's interesting to hear you talk about the disaffection of your class when you went to visited the memorial sites. It reminds me a lot of the kinds of attitudes we would have in school when discussing world wars and so forth (of course we never spoke about the genocide of Canada's First Nations, but that's a whole different story..). We didn't really take it seriously, because it was so distant, even when most of our grandparents had participated in WWII. But I thought that maybe because it was much more recent and immediate for you, the class would have a different reaction.
When I was at the genocide memorial in Kigali, a school group passed through, and the kids were probably around that age. Some of them were horsing around, giggling, not paying attention, the usual. But others were obviously deeply affected, some of the girls had their arms around each other and a couple were even crying. I figured probably that they had relatives who had been murdered, and how brutal it must be for them to see the testimony of the survivors, the bones of the victims, and so on. April is also the month of remembrance for the Rwandan genocide, so we've been hearing a lot of stories from survivors here in Canada this month (it's the 15th anniversary this year).
What do you guys do for the National Day of Remembrance?
no subject
Date: 2009-04-20 09:28 pm (UTC)In the 60's Nazer of egypt was called Hiter. Yasser Arafat was called Hitler. Ahmadinijad is being called Hitler now.
All our enemies are Nazis.
*sigh*
The testimony of survivors is always very emotional, for sure.
What we do? Well, the radio plays dirges, the teevee has Holocaust documentaries and movies and we have ceremonies that in which poems and testimonials and dirges are read and sung.
That's pretty much it.
Next week is National Memorial Day (which we commemorate right before Independence Day), talk about an emotional doozy.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 05:14 am (UTC)Glad you laughed.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 05:36 am (UTC)Now that that's out of the way... I visited the Holocaust museum here in DC back when I was a sophomore in college and spent the entire tour in tears. No one was speaking in the whole building—and if they did, they whispered. At one point I felt like I was being crushed and, even though I'm not normally that crowd phobic, I had to move to the atrium. I sat on a bench for a half hour and just listened. Yes, there were visuals of horrifying things that man has done to his fellow man (and one visceral shot of a German shepherd slathering at the end of a chain leash in the hands of a gestapo)...
But the sounds of those around me was just as powerful.
None of the kids who were there were laughing or carrying on as kids often do.
No one laughed.
Occasionally, I heard the sounds of women like myself crying as quietly as they could.
There was a presence to the building.
My grandmother's mother fled Germany just before the war started—her name was Schultz and thank God she left when she did... I'm uncertain when my grandfather's family immigrated from Germany, but it gave me a lot to think about, sitting there in the middle of all of that history.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 10:12 am (UTC)Flowers were growing, there were butterflies and birds chirping and because it was summer everything was really blooming.
The juxtaposition of that and the images in my mind was also very jarring. Ghosts upon ghosts upon ghosts.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 10:16 am (UTC)I dislike the ceremonies and the siren that makes us stand for a moment of silence, but I do feel that it is important to commemorate the day in some way. Writing about it is my way.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 09:02 pm (UTC)Feel free to discuss any time.