Last week at the Jewish Community Centre, about two dozen Vancouver residents who survived the Holocaust carried candles into an auditorium filled with their children, grandchildren and others who came to mark Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
There were many powerful moments — the haunting, plaintive singing of the Jewish prayer for the souls of the departed and the entire room of hundreds, led by an aging survivor, reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer of sanctification.
But the most moving moments may have been when a chorus of young people — some of them grandchildren of Holocaust survivors — led the audience in the Yiddish anthem called the Partisan Song. The lyrics were written in the Vilna Ghetto in 1943 and spread throughout the surviving Jewish communities of Europe as a hymn of determination. The pounding final words — “The hour that we longed for may be near / Our step beats out a message: We are here!” — are fraught with multiple meanings.
Those who sang them in the ghettoes and camps of Europe mostly did not survive. Of the nine million Jews who lived in Europe in 1939, six million were murdered. Despite this, the very presence of survivors and their descendants is considered a triumph, since it was Hitler’s goal to entirely eradicate the Jews as a people. “Mir zaynen do!” the children sang. We are here!
There are just 13 million Jewish people in the world today, and as the six million killed in the Holocaust are mourned, the generations that were never to be are also lamented.
The Jewish people have done an extraordinary job of commemorating and documenting the events of that time. In fact, Yom HaShoah is on the Jewish calendar alongside the holy days, in keeping with a view I once heard from an academic who said that, in the Jewish narrative, the Holocaust represents something of biblical proportions.
There are things that are unique to the Holocaust and we do humanity a disservice by ignoring them. But to think that there was something unique in the German society or psyche that led to the Holocaust lets all of us off the hook for something that was, ultimately, perpetrated by humans very much like us. German particularity is also denied by the fact of successive horrors, like those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Congo, Darfur, the Balkans and, sadly, elsewhere. And while there seems to be a human trait that allows us to perpetrate the most horrendous crimes against those we identify as different, there is a seemingly even more common characteristic that leads to denial or diminishment of that history.
Now, a century to the day after it began, on April 24, 1915, the mere acknowledgment that the Ottoman Empire launched a genocide against the Armenian people —murdering as many as 1.5 million — is a matter of (preposterous) debate and controversy that even the Pope recently stepped into.
Similarly, many Ukrainians feel that their history in the Holodomor — the deliberate starvation of ethnic Ukrainians by Stalin’s Soviet Union — has not received the extent of attention that it deserves. Estimates of those killed range wildly, from 2.5 to 7.5 million and even higher.
In our own lifetimes, most of us have watched dumbly while millions have died in ethnic atrocities in Africa, Asia and Europe.
But the Jewish people’s commitment to remembering, and the promise that such atrocities must “never again” happen — to anyone — sometimes evokes a backlash. Do the barest Google search or peruse the public comments after a news story on the subject to find people who think there is too much attention given to the Holocaust. A poll in Europe a couple of years ago discovered that the highest proportions of people who felt there was too much talk of the Holocaust were in the countries where the same poll indicated that ignorance of the Holocaust was highest.
The Jewish people are not the only ones who have suffered, an obvious truth spoken too often in the sorts of forums I mentioned above, but they may be the only ones being told to shut up about it.
I believe we have barely even begun to discuss this issue, barely started to understand the coalescence of factors that led to such inhumanity. I can understand why people do not want to dwell on these facts. It is a grisly occupation. But it is not as grisly as letting ignorance lead us to repeat such acts.
The evening before Yom HaShoah, my friend Haya Newman screened her new documentary about a visit to her father’s hometown in Poland to discover what had happened to the 5,000 or so Jews that once lived there. The reactions of today’s townsfolk were interesting. Most people were open and welcoming to discover a Jewish Canadian making a documentary about their town’s history in that dark period. At the same time, she did receive some odd comments.
“Take it easy,” one person told her. “It’s all in the past.”
“There is nothing to look for,” said another man, “You can’t turn back time.”
But the point of studying history is not to turn back time. It is to understand and learn from it to make the future better.
As mournful as the process might be, remembering the worst human atrocities of the past is an act of hope that future generations might transcend our basest human instincts.
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