Random Thoughts on Holocaust Memorial Day

It started with The Eichmann Show. It seemed a great opportunity to learn about a period of history I know shamefully little about. Yet as I watched I found myself feeling strangely distant, unengaged. Even with the horrifying footage shot in the concentration camps and the testimony of the survivors inter-spliced with the drama, I found it too easy to withdraw and pretend it was all a fiction. After all, here was Bilbo, and there was Anthony La Paglia, my goodness doesn’t he look old now, and there’s Rebecca Front – her accent seems pretty good to me but I wonder, how does it sound to Israelis? It was all to easy to think that the whole thing was a fiction. After all, it was so horrifying, so beyond belief, could people really exterminate their friends and neighbours just because of a difference in belief? Is seems unreal.

Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day and there’s been a lot on TV about the Jewish Holocaust. It’s all been informative and horrifying but I have found it very hard to be moved. This isn’t because I don’t care, or that I’ve got a heart of stone, but somehow I’m finding watching these things on TV gives me a distance that allows me to remain detached.

Today I watched a documentary, Touched By Auschwitz that made me start to realise what part of the problem was. And it’s a problem with time. It’s not that these things are so distant (70 years isn’t that long ago in the great scheme of things) but that the people who are still telling their stories are a very biased sample. Many of the people seem to have accepted and even found positives to draw from their experiences in the concentration camps. They have refused to be consumed by hatred or survivor guilt but have found the resilience to carry on and make new lives, good lives for themselves. They have forged new families for themselves and now have good memories of lives well lived and children raised who now have children and grandchildren of their own. Their resilience is remarkable.

But it is this remarkableness that is the problem. Their remarkableness is what has enabled them to survive so that they can be on these programmes. The ones who were consumed by rage or defeated by demons have not survived and cannot tell their tales of how their experiences destroyed them and how they found no strength, had no resilience and could not go on with the memory and knowledge of what was done to them, their families, their friends, their race.

I don’t know if I’ve got a point. I just found myself feeling sad for those voices lost: not just those who died in the ghettos and the camps, but those who could not cope with their new-found freedom in a continent that had tried so hard to wipe them from the face of the earth. I don’t know if I could rebuild my life after experiencing something like that. And I find myself worried that with the ever-dwindling numbers of survivors the range of experiences is also decreasing and that as the years go on these voices may suggest to some that the holocaust couldn’t have been that bad because these people seem balanced and happy and successful, ignoring all the lives not just lost but ruined as people failed to cope with their experiences and died without ever finding peace. 

Holocaust Memorial in Budapest