shoah remembrance

I once wrote a short story called "Second Hand Survivor". The theme was the transference of feelings from a Holocaust survivor on to the next generation and the ramifications of this transference. The feelings are, in the main, guilt ("why did I survive when so many millions did not"), fear ("they said it would never happen again but it might") and over-protective, smothering worry. My mother is a survivor of Auschwitz. She arrived there with the first transport of Slovak girls in June of 1942 and was there till the very end, holding on by the skin of her teeth, through typhoid fever, TB and the murder of her sister. (although it is now accepted linguistic currency to speak of the "six million who died in the Holocaust", I think this should consistently be corrected to the "six million murdered in the Holocaust")

As a child of a survivor, I naturally harbour all the feelings of guilt, fear and worry in large measure. I hope I have not transferred them on to my own daughters but I'm not so sure. If I did, I may have managed to create a generation of "Third Hand Survivors". But, naturally, neither I nor my daughters were actually there and so it would amount to moral theft to try to own the experience - even if that were possible. Suffice it to say that persistent feelings of anxiety reverberate through my life, which in some measure, at least, have to do with my mother's experience.

Yesterday, I spent a few hours in front of the TV, watching the coverage of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The first thing that struck me immediately was how the miserably cold, snowy weather somehow perfectly fit the commemorative occasion. The bone chilling cold and wind signifying the utter desolation of the killing field and the burial ground of millions; and the white, driving snow symbolizing the innocence of the victims. Then there was the shockingly poignant speech of the woman who spoke in Polish about her horrible losses and indescribable suffering - unlike the politicians, her speech was without platitudes and without rehearsed pathos. It was as raw as the wind. Then there were of course the solemn faces of the TV anchors - right across the spectrum from CNN to CBC - men and women who were born and raised after the war in North America and to whom Auschwitz only has distant resonance, if any. Finally, there were the railway tracks, fires lit on each side, burning in the white expanse, illuminating the mocking, horrible sign atop the main entrance to the camp - "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work liberates"). The nausea inducing fear, the sound of the cattle cars rattling down the track, the screeching brakes, the yelping German Sheppard dogs, the barked orders of the SS officers....all of these were evoked in me yet again by watching Auschwitz in the snow.

Sixty years on. Sixty years since Soviet soldiers liberated the camp and found only a few thousand living skeletons. Sixty years since that other snowy day in January 1945 when the chimneys stopped billowing human smoke. Have we glimpsed at least a fraction of the fear and depredation, the sorrow, the devastation and destruction of the Jews murdered in the name of an ideology? I don't think we have. We march on, stepping to the beat of other ideologies (communism managed to murder even more people than fascism did - unimaginable as it seems). We have not learned that freedom is worth fighting for - we still crawl before and appease tyrants. We have not learned that individuals are more important than ideologies - we still blather on about -isms of all kinds (post-modernism, feminism, relativism, imperialism) Above all, we have not learnt that indifference kills. Tragedies since Auschwitz - Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur - as well as before Auschwitz (the Armenian holocaust) have not taught us the lessons that need to be learned. And we are not likely to learn them from the beautiful speeches of politicians or the solemn commentaries of TV anchors. We may glimpse them from the heart-felt, soul-rending speeches such as the one by the Polish woman yesterday. But we will only learn the lesson when we collectively realize that evil must be identified, called by its correct name and opposed with all our might. This century, so far, despite the best efforts of a few nations, seems to be going in the opposite direction!