It is Holocaust Remembrance Day and I would like to post some thoughts. My first thought is that we do not remember anymore. My second thought is that we have never remembered well enough.
People have become quiet, perhaps fearing that remembering 6 million dead entails some other thought. It is a gruesome fact that this entailment has been created in so many minds. That good people stay silent out of fear. That there is this ugly cloud around remembrance itself. This should all be rejected. We should remember what happened because it happened.
Here is what I would like people to know: We never have truly remembered the Holocaust because we never truly knew the Holocaust. The depths of that evil are truly undiscoverable.
People say this insulting thing--that we place Holocaust remembrance above all else. I say we most certainly have not. We do not even know the Holocaust enough to remember it, much less elevate it. And once you learn it, it is a unique event in human history.
When the camps were liberated, there was little mention of Jews specifically. The Nazis were so depraved to so many. The world was an antisemitic place. The initial news reports were of the horrific treatment of POWs. People could not comprehend what had happened to these men in these camps. It broke the human mind.
General Patton vomited when he visited Ohrdruf. Eisenhower wrote that "the visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick." Soldiers doubled over, throwing up. At Dachau, soldiers could smell death and decay five miles before they reached the camp. One liberator recalled seeing soldiers vomiting, crying, experiencing disbelief and rage. Nurses wrote of seeing "human wreckage, living skeletons, diseased, infested with lice and maggots."
That is what happened to the POWs; What happened to the Jews was worse.
And that greater suffering of the Jews? That is another part of this story many of us have never known well enough to properly "remember."
So many in Europe had suffered so horrifically that they resented the Jews for suffering worse. After liberation, Jews were forced into displaced persons camps alongside antisemites and individuals who had harmed Jews during the war--housed together with displaced Germans and Austrians, many of whom had been Nazi collaborators, until Earl Harrison's 1945 report led to separate Jewish camps. Harrison wrote that "we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them."
When Jews returned to their homes after liberation, much of the rest of Europe turned on them. Stealing their clothes and their homes. Beating them to death. Telling them the Germans should have made soap from their bodies. These are things we do not remember because we never knew them in the first place.
Another thing we never knew: the safest place in Europe for European Jews after the war was Germany, where Allied Forces could protect them. These Jewish survivors lived in worse conditions than any other group of survivors. They were not recognized as special. They were recognized as lesser. Their pain was held against them. Their lack of statehood, too. The horror of these conditions led the Americans to eventually pressure the British to open greater immigration gates to British Mandated Palestine. Millions of displaced people; the Jews were treated as the least among them. That is the aftermath of the Holocaust. A history we do not know enough to remember.
We have never truly held this history in our popular imagination. The sardine packing used by the Einsatzgruppen in Lithuania and other Soviet territories; the death camps in Poland. Everyone calls everything else "The Holocaust" these days, but few things are like the Holocaust. Josef Mengele conducted experiments on twins, sewing children together to create conjoined twins. Prisoners were subjected to bone grafting experiments without anesthesia. Mengele injected dye into the eyes of children attempting to change their eye color. Prisoners were deliberately infected with typhus, malaria, and other diseases to test treatments. Limbs were amputated and doctors watched them attempt to heal, or transplanted bones to observe nerve regeneration.
Women were subjected to sterilization experiments. They did the sardine packing—forcing naked people to lie facedown in rows in deep pits, then shooting them, with the next group ordered to lie on top of the bodies and then shot, layer upon layer. They kept a list of every Jew in Europe, including the youngest children, and hunted them all down across the entire continent until 6 million were murdered. They became more and more psychopathic as time went on. Augmenting each other in their lust for Jewish death and suffering.
When you actually learn about the Holocaust, it is a human horror story unlike many others, at least in our direct domain of experience in this Western world. Jews were ignored at best after the Holocaust; at worst, murdered by their neighbors. Formal Holocaust remembrance days weren't established until the late 1970s in the United States. Even then, this word, "Holocaust," was opposed by many survivors. "Holo" means "whole." "Caust" is from the Greek kaustós, meaning "burnt." "To burn in whole."
Many Jews, including survivors, fought against the term; it felt sacrificial. It was only in the late 1980s and 1990s that "Holocaust" remembrance itself became a "thing." Schindler's List was, at the time, revolutionary; yet people treat this all now as if it had been forced upon them. Now, with this history we do not remember and/or malign, we march around the world and say, "Oh, this is like the Holocaust."
Were children hunted down across a continent? Were people injected with disease? Were limbs amputated to watch them heal? Were they packed into "sardines" to be executed—generations upon generations removed from this earth? When one method of mass murder--shooting--proved insufficient for the scale of murder desired--were more "efficient" mechanisms adopted? Are the names of millions still missing because literally no one was left to remember they ever existed at all?
I do not think we remember well now. I do not think we have ever remembered well at all. Because I do not think we have ever really understood what happened there, in Europe, to Jews. It is a very sad thing, I believe, if we turn back time so far that we bring ourselves to 1945, when the rest of Europe said to the Jews who survived: "I hate your survival. I hate your suffering, too." We should do better, for the sake of history, if nothing else.
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