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:
