As Holocaust Remembrance Day comes round again, actual remembrance of the Holocaust seems fainter than ever. The arson attacks on synagogues in France and Australia, the mass-assault on Israeli football supporters in Holland last autumn, or the shocking recent scenes at the Oxford Union, where Jewish speakers were taunted, booed and sworn at by the audience, are a horrible echo from history, almost unimaginable a few decades ago.
At Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote, nothing was morally clearcut
Much of this may be due to demographic change, as sworn enemies of Israel migrate in large numbers to the West. Yet as genuine survivors of the Holocaust die out – a year ago, there were an estimated 245,000 spread across the globe, but with a median age of 86 – some of it’s also, surely, a case of Western amnesia. As James Fenton’s poem ‘A German Requiem’ put it, ‘How comforting it is, once or twice a year, // To get together and forget the old times.’
This, I suspect, is harder for boomers and Generation X than those who came after. Our adolescences were steeped in knowledge of the Holocaust, to the extent that it seemed perennially on the landscape. The US miniseries The Holocaust had appeared on TV in 1978, to much criticism, but after its screening in Germany had opened up a frenzy of debate there about national guilt.
A more distinguished offering, Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time (about an orchestra at Auschwitz whose survival is underwritten by their musical performances for the SS) was broadcast in 1980. Starring Vanessa Redgrave as the central character, it showed her arrival by cattle truck at Auschwitz, and her reduction, in minutes, from glamorous concert pianist to someone who looked like a wizened, hairless old man.
In 1981, Sophie’s Choice came out, featuring the terrible moment (spoiler alert) where the title character, imprisoned in a concentration camp, is forced to decide which one of her children will live, and which go off to the gas-chambers. Those of us too young to watch these on their release often caught them on VHS a few years later, along with films like Marathon Man or Au Revoir les Enfants, Louis Malle’s subdued but affecting story of a Jewish child sheltering from the Nazis at a French boarding school.
Yet nothing loomed as large for my generation as Schindler’s List, whose 1993 release felt like an event in our lives. We waited eagerly for it to come out, queued to see it and, shattered afterwards, telephoned our friends to discuss it. The Jews, perhaps more than any other group, wore for us the ‘halo of tragedy’ (Milan Kundera’s phrase). We learned, unless we turned away, about the gas-chambers and crematoria, the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ of Auschwitz 1. We heard about the factory-efficiency of death-camps like Treblinka (up to 15,000 reportedly killed in a single day), or the grotesque use of Jewish ashes for fertiliser and Jewish hair for textiles. All these things stopped us from saying – that most weaselly and incorrect of modern disclaimers – that such things had happened throughout history or that ‘the Holocaust was really nothing new.’
Often, if we were readers, we sought out books on the subject too. Survivor Primo Levi’s suicide (if that is what it has) had taken place in 1987, but his Auschwitz memoir If This is a Man lived on and was essential reading. Its cool-headed, almost scientific tone as the author (a chemist) recounted his descent into hell was more horrific than any of the ‘literary lechery’ we found in other books on the subject. After that, we had books like A Square of Sky by Janina David, who spent her childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto, or Eli Wiesel’s Night, his brief, harrowing account of seeing, in childhood, his father die at Buchenwald. ‘In Night,’ the author said, ‘I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end – man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left.’
Are those who now routinely damn Israel and pine for its non-existence reading such works? They might progress to learn about the Kielce massacre in Poland, a whole year after the war had ended, sending out a clear sign that Europe would never be a safe place for the Jews to settle. Palestine’s most earnest supporters, intoning righteously about the Nakba – the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homes – might reflect too for a moment on the countless pogroms which have driven Jews themselves, throughout history, from their homes in Europe or the Middle East. Anything to avoid seeing events in terms of pure black and white.
Primo Levi’s essay ‘The Grey Zone,’ in his book The Drowned and the Saved, would have something to say here. At Auschwitz, he wrote, nothing was morally clearcut – there was collaboration and complicity, a generally shared debasement. Man was ‘a mixed-up creature…Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all logic.’
The Jews, perhaps more than any other group, wore for us the ‘halo of tragedy’ (Milan Kundera’s phrase)
Yet such nuances, Levi said, were instinctively shunned by the young – they ‘above all demand clarity, a sharp cut; their experience of the world being meagre, they do not like ambiguity.’
This, and books like Into that Darkness, Gitta Sereny’s study of Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl (whom the writer interviewed repeatedly in jail and even, it seems, found a qualified compassion for), would give them ambiguity in spades.
The Holocaust is still a compulsory subject on the National Curriculum, which, in itself, is heartening. Yet it’s possible to accept the facts of something and not have that accompanying belief in the bones that such things really took place. This has to be worked away at as a kind of faith – with books, films, documentaries, to drive home that such things are not just words on a page or a few black and white photos, safely confined to the past. This, many in my generation (and that before it) tried to do, often out of a kind of duty. The purest mental torture for the victims of the Holocaust, Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote, was to be told by their captors that ‘However this war may end, we have won the war against you…Even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him…people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed.’
Hearing that Jews are once again leaving Europe in their droves, seeing headlines like the Guardian’s ‘Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust,’ or reading surveys about current ignorance, in Britain or elsewhere, of the annihilation of the Jews in Europe, you can only wonder at times what it’s all added up to. Holocaust Remembrance Day is doubtless a date worth keeping, but only if it encourages us, like an annual booster jab, to remember the Holocaust – both its victims and perpetrators – for the rest of the year as well. As survivor and Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel put it, ‘Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow…To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.’
Comments