In an act of mid 1970s parenting technique, best described as cavalier, my beloved (at the time very young) Mum and Dad decided to take the six-year-old me on a day trip, to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. This was probably the defining moment of my life. Too young to understand the context, but aware that it had something to do with being Jewish, I stood in a room full of horrific images, burning naked bodies being put into ovens, starving frightened faces at barbed wired fences. In one corner was a mountain of shoes belonging to dead children. I still remember feeling tiny and traumatised and asking myself: Is this what it means to be Jewish? Its a question I've been asking ever since.
As humans, we are attracted to the things that frighten us the most. We go back again and again to horrors that disturb our sleep, I suppose in order to try and make sense of it. If we understand it, then it can’t haunt us any more. I have gone back again and again over the years to try and make sense of what I saw that day.
My school years were spent reading everything I could get my hands on. I was the freaky 12-year-old who wouldn’t join my contemporaries in Enid Blyton larks, but was reading Fighting Auschwitz and Primo Levi. I was a barrel of laughs! I could have been Alvy Singer’s favourite date, like him preferring The Sorrow and The Pity over more conventional cinematic fare.
I needed to understand, you see, why our small “Religion of The Book”, could evoke such hatred and revulsion to merit the Final Solution. I mean our religion has always been based on: “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” festivals, but the Holocaust — this was something else.
How could so much time, planning, energy and global collusion go into the mass extermination of one people? So huge was the desire to wipe every Jew from the face of the Third Reich earth, that Hitler and Co put into place the world’s only industrialised genocide.
Let’s be clear, companies put in bids and tenders to make the Zyklon B at a cheap price, to build the showers-come-gas chambers to fit the desired number of corpses, the machinery that was needed to run these death camps took precision engineering and constant maintenance, not to mention the fastidious German obsession with paperwork containing names and numbers marked out in a logging system.
Not one type of experimentation or torture could be carried out without it being noted. It was and still maintains to be the most extraordinary act of genocide in its modern scale and planning.
My early introduction to the Shoah has certainly left me with a survivor’s guilt, an inexplicable shame and huge need to stand up to the bully. But also a pride in every single one of us still here, identifying or not, for we are the product of survival.
Yesterday, my little 10-year-old told me that she has started studying the Second World War. Finally, I thrilled, my expertise will come in useful. I regaled her with stories of Goebbels’s propaganda machine and Adolf’s failings as an artist leaving him furious enough to become The Great Dictator.
Then she asked: “Mamma, what is the Holocaust?” And it was a punch to the solar plexus. Because how do we keep the memory and legacy alive for our next generations?
We must never let them forget. But we must also teach that there is no shame, no lasting horror and so much positivity in our people’s survival. The Holocaust has meant that we are in a special place to observe and police and care for other victims of suffering. This is my new lesson and I am trying to learn it.
