Introduction
As the generation which survived the Holocaust passes on, many feel
compelled—if not by those family members and Friends who wish to know what
happened, the personal witness of someone they have lived with, then sometimes
from Deep inner need long held at bay, repressed for a variety of reasons,
painful and filled with guilt, to speak a truth only they know, ev en if a
hundred or a thousand others have the same or similar memories to bring to
public view. Such writings are sometimes
written by men and women who have become in the new world of their physical
release from the humiliations and injuries of the Shoah quite adept with words
and ideas, whether in literary or historical discourses, and so their texts
have the skill and the power to represent vividly and forcefully the reality
that must never be forgotten. Others
more humble, shaken to the core by their experiences into a virtual inability
to articulate what they lived through, or too busy with family and with
business to find the time to put down in words what they dream of often or mull
over in the all too rare still moments of everyday affairs. Each in their way is a valuable testimony to
the collective memory of the Jewish people, all their differences linked into
and validating the otherwise unimaginable and unspeakable horrors of the Shoah. Each testimony comes with its own specific
context of individual, family and community experiences, knowledge and
temperament.
And yet, as many of such memories can be put down on to paper, collected
by scholars and other memorialists for preservation, studied by new generations
who must learn what happened or lose a large portion their own humanity, there
are also those millions of voices, stories, memories, histories and cries of
anguish that will never be heard; and these vast shameful silences of the
Holocaust provide the ultimate context in which we must read and learn and
forever mourn the enormity of these losses, at the same time as gaining courage
and insight from those relatively few survivors who have been able to create
the textual richness we are bound to honour forever.
This storage house of memories—with its poetry, its paintings, its
private letters, its essays and its narratives—provides a vast source of
documentation to stand against those who would deny, trivialize or abuse the
reality of the Shoah. Each person
recalls in his or her own particular and peculiar way what happened, and yet,
as we said above, all these facets can never tell the whole story, the complete
truth—or fill in all the gaps, the silences, the invisibilities, the visceral aching and
the moral longing for what has been taken away by madness and hatred, by ignorance
and bigotry, by stupidity and perverted logic.
We read such books, or look at such paintings, or listen to such poetry,
not for pleasure, for comfort or for escape from our own private hurts and
losses. We can admire skill, but respect
awkwardness and hesitation because they are also part of the record we have to
assemble and study. We can take courage
from those who struggled to survive, but also stand in awe at those who somehow
made it through the ordeal, were rescued by others, or who do not at all know
why they came out and others more worthy or more beloved did not. We also always wonder how we would have
reacted, and we hear now too the all too frightening echoes of the old hatreds
once again being shouted, argued, put into action in our own contemporary
world, things we had been brought up to believe would never be said or done
again. That means we can no longer read
these documents of personal witness and collective memory passively, as though
they did not affect us, our children, our grandchildren.
What happened to boys and girls—for it is likely the only survivors
still alive today were young children during the Holocaust—has shaped how they
see and feel about the world. Though by
now those who are in their 70s and 80s have grown up elsewhere than in the
death camps or in hiding from the Nazis, have been educated, married, and spent
long years in various professions and jobs or raising their own families, that
relatively short period is the key determinant of their personality, character
and career.
In other words, though each memory preserved in this way has a value
both in itself and as part of the now concluding gathering in of as many as
possible of such texts, not all are equal either in terms of literary value—in the
sense of well-crafted, deeply-thought through accounts, which create works of vivid,
persuasive and aesthetic—or historical value, in the sense of adding new
information that clarifies previously misunderstood events, places, or persons,
chronologies, motivations and so on. Some
of these works deserve more than placement in archives where they can be
consulted by specialists in the field and where they can demonstrate the extent
of the Holocaust through all formal Jewish communities and individuals and
families who lived alongside of or outside of those communities.
Others may be very useful for teaching school
children and the general public about what the Shoah was all about, providing
examples and testimonies that awaken interest, generate curiosity to read more,
and help continue the collective memory. In this way, too, while all the books together
stand to prevent loss of interest through the passage of time and the
overtaking of other more pressing contemporary issues, overwhelming the
strident voices of denial and trivialization, a few stand out as points of crystallization
and organization; and though it may seem that Primo Levy or Anne Frank and
other formative writers have basically said it all—such books appearing out of
the Holocaust itself or shortly thereafter—many, including novels and poems and
plays, since then have refined our vision, corrected errors, and added new
kinds of information, personal and historical.
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