For the dead and the living
We must bear witness
Elie Wiesel
Clara Kramer, Holocaust survivor and author of the book Clara's War
April 19, is Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day. Based on the Jewish calendar, Holocaust Remembrance Day is not celebrated on the same day each year. And so, although we are commemorating the Holocaust on April 19 this year, Yom HaShoah will be on Monday, April 8 in 2013. Officially, Yom HaShoah began at sunset on Wednesday April 18 in Jerusalem, when a torch was lit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial by six Holocaust survivors. Lighting candles is a common theme in many commemorative events. There are also processions, speeches, and Holocaust survivors sharing stories of survival. Hearing one person telling about what happened to them is a powerful way to bring such a horrific event down to a scale that other human beings can comprehend. As Joseph Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." (For more on whether it was, indeed, Stalin who said this and why go to The Quote Investigator's post on this topic.)
There are many places to go to find these stories. Amazon.com lists over 1,000 Holocaust memoirs; the website, The Jewish Eye, recommends about 25. My personal favorite is The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by New York writer Daniel Mendelsohn. The Lost chronicles Mendelsohn's search for what happened to his great-uncle's family who lived in a small town in the Ukraine and died in the Holocaust. Mendelsohn's book is a miracle of detail that evokes not just the deaths, but the ephemeral, previously unknown lives of his aunt, uncle, and cousins. In the end, I think that it is only in contemplating the shared humanity of other peoples' very specific lives that we can come closer to grieving for the millions who perished in the Holocaust. (At left, Old Jewish cemetery, Ukraine; photo: WikiMedia Commons)
There are still Holocaust survivors alive today who participate in sharing their stories and, not surprisingly, Holocaust Remembrance Day provides a good excuse (as though one were needed) to do that. In 2010, a journalist working for The Manchester Guardian estimated that there were only 5,000 Holocaust survivors remaining in the UK. He documented the stories of some of them in his series on Holocaust Survivors. Filmmakers are also rushing to document survivors' stories before they are gone. Below is one story. There are many others. The Shoah Foundation's Visual Archives has preserved and made available 52,000 more interviews (testimonies, as they call them) with survivors.
Stories are essential for those who wish to understand and remember an event they neither witnessed nor took part in. Stories are also tremendously beneficial to survivors and to society at large. Author Judith Herman has written about this in her seminal book Trauma and Recovery. "Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites," Herman writes, "for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual[s]."
Stolperstein, Germany (photo: WikiMedia Commons)
There are times when words fail. That's when people turn to memorials and other forms of visual art. I looked at quite a few pictures of Holocaust memorials, but, in the end, none of them seemed satisfying. They were too large, too abstract, to monumental, or too horrific. Then I found the stolpersteins. In the 1990s in Germany, artist Gunter Demnig came up with the concept of creating small - approximately 4-inch-square - memorials for people who died as a result of Nazi violence. These memorials, which Demnig calls stolperstein (from the German for stumbling block), are brass plates mounted on cement and placed on streets and sidewalks closest to the place where the person memorialized last lived. The memorials have the "title" Hier Wohnte, which means "here lived" in German, and a brief bio of the person, including birth date, deportation or death date, and place of death. Demnig began his work in Germany, placing hundreds of stolperstein in cities and towns around the country. Today, there are thousands of stolperstein in hundreds of towns and cities in Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, and other European countries. I was tremendously moved when I looked at online pictures of these memorials. To me, they seem like the best sort of memorial, one pitched to a human scale. I can imagine what it would be like to be walking down a street and to suddenly come upon one of these mini-memorials. I know I would pause, bend down and take a closer look and lean closer and touch the brass lettering and wonder who this person had once been, who they might have lived to be.
Stolperstein, commemorating Manfred Cohn, who died in Auschwitz (WikiMedia Commons)
I find the stolperstein above to be particularly moving. Young people, such as Manfred Cohn, rarely survived the Holocaust.
Do you think it's important to remember traumatic events such as the Holocaust? Why or why not?
