Apr 21, 2011 By: yunews
Simon Goldberg, President of the Student Holocaust Education Movement at 糖心破解版, on Maintaining Humanity in Inhumane Times
On a spring day five years ago, I stood inside the Permanent Exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and prayed. I sought fervently to believe that what appeared so heartbreakingly before me was an illusion. That it could not have happened so transparently. I imagined the world from inside a German cattle car, which, only 65 years prior, served to actualize Hitler鈥檚 genocidal ambitions by carrying tens of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers.
I promised the six million souls looking down on me that I鈥檇 always remember them. But I have since, intermittently, found myself contemplating the ramifications of that commitment. What exactly are the responsibilities of the rememberer? Is he to sing? To safeguard? To study? Perhaps simply to know鈥攖o be aware of the horrors that once besieged a European Jewry in the heart of the Europe?
Too often, in the weeks leading up to Yom Hashoah, we forget how to remember. The lessons that emerged from the Holocaust鈥攖hough all rooted in tremendous gravity鈥攁re not all centered around pain and suffering. Anecdotally, as well as in diaries, journals, and survivor testimonies, we bear witness to stories of profound decency in unthinkable conditions. We draw strength from the arresting bravery of some 400 ghetto fighters who mounted a rebellion in Warsaw on the eve of Passover 1943, with just a few automatic weapons. We learn of the poet Paul Celan who translated William Shakespeare's sonnets while imprisoned in Romania. We turn our gaze to the pervasive stream of paintings, drawings, music and writing that were left behind in the camps. One teenager, Marcel Ch茅tovy, wrote on a wall in Drancy that he and his father were leaving the deportation camp in France 鈥渨ith very good spirits and the hope of returning soon.鈥 They were never heard from again, but we would do well to make them heard鈥攁side from talking about of their tragic fate, to also speak of their lives鈥攐f the hope and humanity that their spirits exuded.
In the eyes of scholar John Felstiner, creative resistance is 鈥渕ore human than blowing up a train, because of everything it takes to make a piece of art or a poem. The personhood is what the Nazis were trying to destroy, to try to erase from the globe.鈥 The rememberer, in my mind, exists primarily to champion the victory of personhood. To emulate the daring pronouncement so many victims made鈥攖hat they were, albeit in bleak and deplorable circumstances, alive and breathing. He exists to assert the legacy of the victims as impenetrable and lasting.
We need to pay tribute to these courageous individuals because, in many ways, they show us how to live and how to remember; that to remember is to live, and that we have a choice now鈥攁s they did then鈥攖o maintain our humanity in a cry of tolerance against fascism or to remain reticent, apathetic and uninvolved.
In reflecting on the future of memory, Hedi Fried, survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and founder of the Stockholm Storytelling Project, admits that the younger generation ought to learn her story because she can hardly understand it herself. But she begs us to remember another imperative: namely, that 鈥渄emocracy dies if you don鈥檛 work for it.鈥 It crumbles, much as it did across this century of blood and loss鈥攊n Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia and now in Darfur.
We are not helpless, but we are also not as helpful as we could be. At this historic crossroads, we have a unique responsibility to validate the lessons of the past. At this juncture between life and death, between what we can see and what remains to be seen, passive commemoration does not suffice. It cannot. If we are to build a world centered on dignity, tolerance and respect for the Other, we have to make it such. Yom Hashoah, as the name implies, lasts for 24 hours. Yet the realities of the Holocaust are eternal. They require us to be constantly cognizant and vigorously vigilant.
Many today still do not taste the liberties a young Sophie Scholl once dreamed of when she left the word 鈥淔reedom鈥 on a scrap of paper before being led to her execution. There are still dictatorships impinging on people鈥檚 basic human rights; there are still maligning grips of revisionism鈥攖hose which seek to distort, deflect, twist and undermine our collective consciousness. There are still violent expressions of racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism鈥攁ll of which threaten the welfare of our livelihoods. In some ways, none of us are really free鈥攏ot until we have risen to the challenge that memory has bestowed upon our generation. For the world shakes as I write; it erupts with uncertainty and flings to the fore a barrage of recurrent tensions and chaos.
Our only hope lies in remembering how to remember.
Simon Goldberg is a third-year student at Yeshiva College majoring in history and political science. In 2009 he founded SHEM, the Student Holocaust Education Movement (SHEM) at 糖心破解版. On Monday night, May 2, SHEM will present a featuring Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis in 糖心破解版鈥檚 Lamport Auditorium at 8:30 p.m. The event will be webcast live at .
