So today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which I have to confess I didn’t realise was a thing — I only knew about Yom ha’Shoa, which is mid-April. But I’m glad it IS a thing, because people need to remember.
The Shoa is intensely personal for me. On my father’s side, I know of thirteen immediate family members who died — great-aunts, great-uncles, their spouses and children, my great-grandmother. The family was lucky: my grandfather and three of his brothers were early deportees, and managed to escape into Russia when they were driven into the river with machine-gun fire, and a fourth brother spent the war hidden by his German wife. If they hadn’t emigrated from Warsaw to Brno at the end of the 19th century, I probably wouldn’t be here today. My mother’s side fared less well: both of her parents, Hungarian-born, were the only survivours of their immediate families.
I grew up around survivours, reading between the lines, finding stories wherever I could. My grandmother was reticent; she wrote poetry about her experiences but didn’t talk about them. I was eighteen before I knew she’d had a younger brother. It’s one thing to read about Mengele and his white gloves standing on the platform at Auschwitz, and another to finally read about my grandmother’s arrival there and realise she’d seen him. My grandfather never talked until very recently, so I only knew he’d had some time with partisans in Yugoslavia; I didn’t know he’d been in a copper mine down there, nor that he’d narrowly escaped death by virtue of a partisan raid when his column was in transit, nor that he’d walked back home from there. I never met my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, so I never got to hear his story — and I only ever met my paternal grandmother (who was not Jewish but had her own tales of wartime altercations with the Nazis, as one did if one was Czech) a few times when I was very young. It makes me think of all the voices silenced, of those who never spoke or could not speak, or who tried and were not heard.
It’s not just about anti-Semitism. At its core, the Holocaust — like any genocide — has hate of The Other. This day is about remembering what’s happened, and about preventing repetition. A survivour I knew while growing up was heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement when she came to the US, and then campaigned for awareness of the genocide in Darfur. If you have the strength to do that, it’s terrific and amazing, but the small things matter too. Stand up for others. Don’t accept what you see going on around you. And more — be proactive.
Situations like the Shoa — the death of six million Jews, a million Roma, and countless others, homosexuals and mentally ill and Poles and Slavs and more, whose only crime was being different — happen because people don’t act. They happen because people don’t stop and think and say, “This is wrong.” They happen because it’s too easy to say, “He isn’t like me — what happens to him doesn’t matter to me. Why should I care?” Care because you’re human. Care because caring is one of the most beautiful things about being human.
“Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9) Words to live by, no matter what your beliefs.
[Photos are mine: the Roma/Sinti Memorial in Berlin, and the memorial by the river at Terezin.]