Holocaust Memorial Quotes

Odysseus inclines his head. "True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles. "Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.

What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.

If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?

It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

I am the harvest of man's stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget.

In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.

Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

Every day now, I found a chance to slip outside and leave food under the fence. I knew it was a drop in the ocean, but I could not do nothing.

Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.

If we were stopped and questioned, I always smiled at the officers, and they always smiled back. In my heart, I was seeing them dead. But on my face, I was an open invitation. If you are only a girl, this is how you destroy your enemies.

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.

Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.

Nothing about these times makes any sense. Nothing. Putting it to words only makes it sound too simple.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?

Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their positive aspects in the long run? … You have to be careful of taking a knee-jerk attitude. Having a knee-jerk attitude to anything is a mistake, especially in the case of women, where it adds up to this very limited and condescending thing of saying they’re fragile, breakable things that can be destroyed easily. Everybody gets hurt and violated and broken sometimes. Why are women so special? Not that anybody ought to be raped or abused, nobody’s saying that, but that’s what is going on. What about afterwards? All I’m saying is there are certain cases where it can enlarge you or make you more of a complete human being, like Viktor Frankl. Think about the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust a good thing? No way. Does anybody think it was good that it happened? No, of course not. But did you read Viktor Frankl? Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? It’s a great, great book, but it comes out of his experience. It’s about his experience in the human dark side. Now think about it, if there was no Holocaust, there’d be no Man’s Search for Meaning… . Think about it. Think about being degraded and brought within an inch of your life, for example. No one’s gonna say the sick bastards who did it shouldn’t be put in jail, but let’s put two things into perspective here. One is, afterwards she knows something about herself that she never knew before. What she knows is that the most totally terrible terrifying thing that she could ever have imagined happening to her has now happened, and she survived. She’s still here, and now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. Look, totally terrible things happen… . Existence in life breaks people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time, trust me I know. I’ve been there. And this is the big difference, you and me here, cause this isn’t about politics or feminism or whatever, for you this is just ideas, you’ve never been there. I’m not saying nothing bad has ever happened to you, you’re not bad looking, I’m sure there’s been some sort of degradation or whatever come your way in life, but I’m talking Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning type violation and terror and suffering here. The real dark side. I can tell from just looking at you, you never. You wouldn’t even wear what you’re wearing, trust me. What if I told you it was my own sister that was raped? What if I told you a little story about a sixteen-year-old girl who went to the wrong party with the wrong guy and four of his buddies that ended up doing to her just about everything four guys could do to you in terms of violation? But if you could ask her if she could go into her head and forget it or like erase the tape of it happening in her memory, what do you think she’d say? Are you so sure what she’d say? What if she said that even after that totally negative as what happened was, at least now she understood it was possible. People can. Can see you as a thing. That people can see you as a thing, do you know what that means? Because if you really can see someone as a thing you can do anything to him. What would it be like to be able to be like that? You see, you think you can imagine it but you can’t. But she can. And now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. This is what you wanted to hear, you wanted to hear about four drunk guys who knee-jerk you in the balls and make you bend over that you didn’t even know, that you never saw before, that you never did anything to, that don’t even know your name, they don’t even know your name to find out you have to choose to have a fucking name, you have no fucking idea, and what if I said that happened to ME? Would that make a difference?

The ceremony was fast so we wouldn't be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered 'Mazel tov' and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands, the only present I could give him. The boy looked at me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young? 'We are alive,' I told him. 'We are alive, and that is all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the pages of the world.' I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive.

After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.

But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another... We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows? Perhaps one day I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you... We are men only. A brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please.

Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.

Regardless of where many of us believe we land - in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much - we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events - love, shopping, and so forth - but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us?

I feel like... the boy lost somewhere between the torment of memory and a few fragile shards of hope.

From the holocaust to the hologram: a fine programme.

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum qtd. in Halter)

provides a handy and interesting passage to the Holocaust memorial

It would be wrong to call them memories; they are moments of life, that man hat es erlebt- one has lived. They are inside me, part of me, branded into my skin, you might say - but they're not memories I want to live with, because there's no experience to be gained from them.

Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler's Lebensraum policy. In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.* During the first half of this century, a majority of American states enacted sterilization laws and tens of thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when they enacted their own sterilization laws.'' The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned popular violence than the Jews in prewar Germany. To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of The Holocaust. The more revealing point, however, is when the US invokes The Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as the Khmer Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo recall The Holocaust; crimes in which the US is complicit do not.

To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a "false negative" recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account.

Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

I am the harvest of man’s stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can’t forget.” During

chairman of the Washington Post Company, in a one-word e-mail I received the morning after the story appeared. A German filmmaker, who happened to be visiting Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum on the day the story was published, decided to make a documentary about Shin’s life.

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest and the Holocaust are vulnerable to this kind of concerted denial because of their unfathomability, the unjustifiability, and the threat they pose to the politics of patriarchy and anti-Semitism respectively. Over and over, survivors of the Holocaust attest that they were warned of what was happening in Poland but could not believe it at the time, could not believe it later as it was happening to them, and still to this day cannot believe what they, at the same time, know to have occurred. For Holocaust deniers this is a felicitous twist, for their arguments denying the Holocaust and therefore the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state capitalize on the discrepancies of faded memory. In the case of incest, although post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia, and dissociation represent some of the mind's strategies for comprehending the incomprehensible, incest deniers have taken advantage of inconsistencies to discredit survivor testimony.

It takes solidarity and generosity of spirit to build a society in which anyone can feel safe. Empathy can be hard to find, especially for people who look or sound different, or believe different things to us. But when we allow ourselves to be pitted against each other, and to be ruled by the meaner emotions, we dig our own graves alongside those of the people we abandon. It's only when we understand our essential commonality that we can protect ourselves: not as individual humans, but as members of an indivisible whole.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?' He smiles. 'Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.

If you are only a girl, this is how you destroy your enemies.

gentleman and knew what Rokita

May his memory be a blessing to all of us.

You are in a concentration camp. In Auschwitz..." A pause. He was observing the effect his words had produced. His face remains in my memory to this day. A tall man, in his thirties, crime written all over his forehead and his gaze. He looked at us as one would a pack of leprous dogs clinging to life. "Remember," he went on. "Remember it always, let it be graven in your memories. You are in Auschwitz. And Auschwitz is not a convalescent home. It is a concentration camp. Here, you must work. If you don't you will go straight to the chimney. Work or crematorium--the choice is yours.

Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another.” He spread his broad hands. “We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.

Within a decade or two, all Holocaust survivors will likely have passed away so a ticking clock is in effect in this battle between the truth and lies. Keep in mind even those survivors born in a concentration camp during WW2 would be at least 71 years-of-age when this book (the one you are reading now) was released. Those survivors old enough to clearly recall the events of that nightmare will, of course, be older and have much less time left. As the memory of the Holocaust begins to fade away, it will become easier to deny the genocide even occurred unless those of us who are truthseekers are able to embrace the memory of the genocide and educate others do the same. What’s needed in this propaganda war is for the true stories of Holocaust survivors – as well as those of the Nazi perpetrators, their associates and others who witnessed the genocide – to be told loudly and clearly so that there will never, ever be room for doubt in generations to come. After all, nothing is more powerful, credible or damning than eyewitness accounts.

The things I need to say can only be written furtively on scraps of smuggled paper, in moments of time stolen from the dead for the sake of their memory. They can only be hidden away in tins and jars, carefully sealed with scraps of cloth and hidden with great fear and greater longing amid fragmented bones—buried in the uncaring ground soaked with our blood. We bury them as we could not bury our loved ones. These things can never be told.

True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another.” He spread his broad hands. “We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.

I try and reconstruct them from faded photographs and a few letters which survived the holocaust and my emigration to England nearly half a century ago. Their world has become submerged in the past, like Atlantis, and they have taken my childhood with them.

Despite its veneer of impartial scholarship, Butz’s book is replete with the same expressions of traditional anti-Semitism, philo-Germanism and conspiracy theory as the Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the most scurrilous neo-Nazi groups. -- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, page 126

I want to remember my past To see before my eyes The image of my parents The house in which I grew up The village in which my family lived for generations I don't want to remember my past I fear for what my memory Might bring before my eyes I wonder whether I can continue my life If I'll rescue from oblivion What I want to recall.

And so the picture that I showed her that Sunday, a picture I'd seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in the keepsakes but had no memories to go with them.

When I have suggested to my colleagues that we must take seriously Eichmann's repeated testimony to the effect that he learned from Heydrich in the fall of 1941 of Hitler's order for the physical destruction of the Jews, I have met with either embarrassed silence or open skepticism. How can I be so gullible? Don't I know that Eichmann's testimony is a useless conglomeration of faulty memories on the one hand and calculated lies for legal defense and self-justification on the other? From it we can learn nothing of value about what actually happened during the war, only about Eichmann's state of mind after the war. These are documents that reveal how Eichmann wished to be remembered, not what he did. -- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 4-5

The idea that an understanding of the genocide, that a memory of the holocausts, can only lead people to want to dismantle the system, is erroneous. The continuing appeal of nationalism suggests that the opposite is truer, namely that an understanding of genocide has led people to mobilize genocidal armies, that the memory of holocausts has led people to perpetrate holocausts. The sensitive poets who remembered the loss, the researchers who documented it, have been like the pure scientists who discovered the structure of the atom. Applied scientists used the discovery to split the atom’s nucleus, to produce weapons which can split every atom’s nucleus; Nationalists used the poetry to split and fuse human populations, to mobilize genocidal armies, to perpetrate new holocausts.

Cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero. So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed,

Bazen Polonya'daki nefret miktarını düşündüğümde çimenlerin hala yeşil kalabilmelerine, ağaçların hala dallarını gökyüzüne uzatabilmelerine şaşırıyordum. Ama uzatıyorlardı. Savaşla ilgili en büyük ironilerden biri de bu, insanın inana sırt çevirdiği yerde bile doğa başkaldırmıyordu. Çok güzel bahar günlerinde geçen kabuslar yaşıyordum: Kuşlar daldan dala atlayıp böcekleri avlarken, diğer kuşlarla cilveleşirken diğer tarafta yerde, çamur içinde küçük çocuklar ölü yatıyorlardı.

There are now little brass plaques on the ground outside this address. These are Stolpersteine. Tributes to the victims of the Holocaust. There are many of them in Berlin, especially in Charlottenburg. They are not easy to spot. You must walk with your head down, seeking memories between the cobblestones. In front of 15 Wielandstrasse, three names can be read. Paula, Albert, and Charlotte. But on the wall, there is only one commemorative plaque. The one for Charlotte Salomon.

But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another...We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?...Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.' 'I doubt it.' Odysseus shrugs. 'We cannot say. We are men only, a brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please. Patroclus may be such as will rise in the future.' 'He is not.

My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.

To the Dead My concerns belong to the living. I see hear touch weigh myself on a street scale I dodge a blue tram In July I wipe the sweat off a shiny forehead I drink raspberry soda I am tired I am bored I write poems I think about death I buy pretzels and fuzzy peaches that look like baby mice I read Marx I don’t understand Bergson I go out dancing with a redhead and we laugh about the A-bomb the red circle of lips a long golden straw my girl in a green blouse drinks the moon from the sky a waiter carries foamy beer around lights glisten on the eyelashes of evening the memory of you covered my anxiety with a hand. These are my concerns. I live and nothing is as alien to me as you my dead Friend.

But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark. I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large. And who in modern memory had been plundered more than the victims of the Holocaust? But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder.

В Германии практически каждый знал о Холокосте — ведь он начался с массовых убийств в Восточной Европе, в которых приняли непосредственное участие десятки тысяч немцев. Сотни тысяч, если не миллионы, знали об этом; вероятно, чуть ли не каждый немецкий солдат на Восточном фронте. И мы знаем, что они писали об этом домой. Я полагаю, что Холокост как факт был широко известен задолго до того, как был устроен Освенцим. А после войны пришли американцы и британцы и обнаружили лагеря смерти. И они спросили у немцев: "Вы знали об этом?" И получили вполне правдивый ответ: "Нет, мы не знали точно, что там происходило". Так лагеря заслонили собой Холокост. И по сегодняшний день Холокост у немцев ассоциируется прежде всего с лагерями смерти, хотя на самом деле он был сравнительно мало связан с ними [161].

It took me another few hours to realize that I had just spent an entire day at a Jewish museum that made no mention of the Holocaust. It was as if the Jews of the shtetlach from that first display case had just vanished, disappeared into history for no apparent reason. It was as though there had been no reason for the new influx of Jews after the war. It was as though history, and Birobidzhan itself, had just happened. That view of history is the post-Soviet condition. What happened to people - to families that still carry the memory, whose physical and psychic scars are plainly visible - was so enormous and so inexplicable, and, worst of all, the victims and their executioners were so intimately entangled, so indistinguishable at times, that, following a brief and torturous period of examination, the country's population has conspired to treat it as a force of nature.

Historically, holism had been a break from the reductionist methods of science. Holism (...) is a way of viewing the universe as a web of interactions and relationships. Whole systems (and the universe can be seen as an overarching system of systems) have properties beyond those of their parts. All things are, in some sense, alive, or a part of a living system; the real world of mind and matter, body and consciousness, cannot be understood by reducing it to pieces and parts. 'Matter is mind' – this is perhaps the holists' quintessential belief. The founding theories of holism had tried to explain how mind emerges from the material universe, how the consciousness of all things is interconnected. The first science, of course, had failed utterly to do this. The first science had resigned human beings to acting as objective observers of a mechanistic and meaningless universe. A dead universe. The human mind, according to the determinists, was merely the by-product of brain chemistry. Chemical laws, the way the elements combine and interact, were formulated as complete and immutable truths. The elements themselves were seen as indivisible lumps of matter, devoid of consciousness, untouched and unaffected by the very consciousnesses seeking to understand how living minds can be assembled from dead matter. The logical conclusion of these assumptions and conceptions was that people are like chemical robots possessing no free will. No wonder the human race, during the Holocaust Century, had fallen into insanity and despair. Holism had been an attempt to restore life to this universe and to reconnect human beings with it. To heal the split between self and other. (...) Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality's particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness. It has been formalized and canonized, and taught to the swarms of humanity searching for a fundamental unity. Only, human beings have learned it as a theory and a doctrine, not as an experience. A true holism should embrace not only the theory of living systems, but also the reality of the belly, of wind, hunger, and snowworms roasting over a fire on a cold winter night. A man or woman (or child) to be fully human, should always marvel at the mystery of life. We each should be able to face the universe and drink in the stream of photons shimmering across the light-distances, to listen to the ringing of the farthest galaxies, to feel the electrons of each haemoglobin molecule spinning and vibrating deep inside the blood. No one should ever feel cut off from the ocean of mind and memory surging all around; no one should ever stare up at the icy stars and feel abandoned or alone. It was partly the fault of holism that a whole civilization had suffered the abandonment of its finest senses, ten thousand trillion islands of consciousness born into the pain and promise of neverness, awaiting death with glassy eyes and murmured abstractions upon their lips, always fearing life, always longing for a deeper and truer experience of living.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

Rose Rose is the name of a flower or a dead girl You can place a rose in a warm palm or in black soil A red rose screams one with golden hair passed in silence Blood drains from the pale petal the girl’s dress hangs formless A gardener tends tenderly to a bush a father who survived rages in madness Five years have passed since Your death flower of love that knows no thorn Today a rose bloomed in the garden memory of the living and faith have died.

I first traveled to Germany when I was twenty years old on a train from Paris, where I was studying abroad. I still had the memory of falling asleep on the train in France and waking up to the sound of the German language being spoken over the loudspeaker, a conductor calling out the names of the next stops. Hearing these incomprehensible sounds evoked the secular New York Jewish education that I had received from my mother: The Holocaust was the central event of the twentieth century; you had family that was killed in the Holocaust; the Germans, the most civilized of people, did this. Still, on this trip, and on all the trips to come in the years ahead, there was little space for personal reflection. Instead, my energy—emotional and mental—would be channeled into the work I had to do.

In my heart, I was seeing them dead. But on my face, I was an open invitation. If you are only a girl, this is how you destroy your enemies.

I have tried to live my life in a way that would make my parents proud. With the publication of this book, I feel the memory of these resilient heroes will live on and be an example to the world. I am proud to be their son. I have a lot to live up to. Shlomo (Karen's husband)

Even if we, as northerners, choose to ignore this history, the victims’ descendants will not

In Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, there is a term reserved for such people as Tamara—the Righteous Among the Nations—Christians who practiced the true spirit of their teachings and became Messiahs in their own right.They were saviors who reached out to their fellow human beings because they never lost a sense of morality, dignity, or compassion. Selfless acts of humanity were in short supply, but those of us who survived will forever remember them.

Molte cose furono allora fra noi dette e fatte; ma di queste è bene che non resti memoria.

We will never know all there is to know about Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. No single story can relate it all, and the pieces that we uncover may not fit together to our satisfaction. But the collage of stories and memories, of cruelty and courage, while continuing to test our comprehension of history and humanity, helps us see what human beings - not only men, but women as well - are capable of believing and doing.

Jews have grown so obsessed with Israel that the overt and covert signals of anti-Semitism beamed from the interior of the Trump campaign appeared to be disregarded by people like Adelson and Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot co-founder and Republican mega-donor who seemed wowed by candidate Trump’s solemn promise to immediately move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to back Likud’s expansive settlement policy on the West Bank. Never mind that both moves were purely symbolic: Netanyahu was going to do what he was going to do regardless of Washington’s feckless policies or the location of its ambassador. What mattered was Israel, pure and simple. It was something of a comeuppance when President Trump immediately backed off his promise of an embassy move, swiftly sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu scolding him on settlements, and promised a new push for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But beyond leaked word that Adelson was really, really, really angry, no apologies or mea culpas were forthcoming from American Jewry. Trump did make Israel a stop on his first trip abroad—the earliest visit to the Jewish state by any American president. But before his arrival, his White House made no comment on the two Israeli-American journalists who were denied visas to follow the president into Saudi Arabia, where he happily danced with swords and his commerce secretary boasted that there had been no protestors. Once he had landed in Jerusalem, Trump did note that he “just got back from the Middle East,” a moment memorialized by Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, covering his face with his hand in frustration or amazement. Trump scheduled all of fifteen minutes for a stop at Yad Vashem, Israel’s revered Holocaust memorial and museum, and in his brief remarks there—from 1:27 to 1:34 p.m.—he managed both to extol the Jewish people and let slip his cherished stereotypes: “Through persecution, oppression, death, and destruction, the Jewish people have persevered. They have thrived. They’ve become so successful in so many places.” Ever solicitous, Netanyahu thanked the president, who “in so few words said so much.” No one took note of the irony that the Holocaust survivor who greeted Trump, Margot Herschenbaum, had been rescued in 1939 by the Kindertransport, which had whisked her out of Germany and had saved thousands of other Jewish children. Refugees like Herschenbaum had been denied entry to the United States during World War II, just as Trump has steadfastly denied the entry of Syrian children fleeing war and death in their own country.

Israeli national identity oscillates between the poles of the Holocaust and the Six-Day War, victim and vanquisher - the latter is the antidote too the former. Permanently vulnerable, Israel must respond to any attack with massive force. For a nation with genocide as a central political referent, security is paramount, and it trumps all other considerations. "Never again!" puts Israel's militaristic policy choices into a place beyond debate.

Sadly, memories of World War II, the Holocaust, and the gulags fade by the day. New-right leaders promise a return to the strong welfare state of the past, but with the caveat that it be ethnically and racially bound. They spew forth a range of patriarchal, racist, and homophobic ideas, each made more palatable by wrapping those concepts in racial purity and national honor. And they are winning elections. Even more important, they are framing issues. And the old wisdom is correct. He who frames an issue, wins that issue more often than not. Sadly, what Hitler said so long ago still rings true today. The masses have little time to think. And how incredible is the willingness of modern man to believe.

A world of meaning is lost when these views of racial ideology, the brutalization of war and the state-run process of extermination dominate our understanding of the Holocaust because the question "Why did the Nazis and other Germans burn the Hebrew Bible?" demands a historical imagination that captures Germans' culture, sensibilities, and historical memories.

The high profile now enjoyed by the Holocaust or Shoah in public memory of the Second World War has contributed to the assumption that a major factor in waging the war against Germany and its European Axis allies was to end the genocide and liberate the remaining Jewish populations. This is largely an illusion. The war was not fought to save Europe’s Jews, and indeed the governments of all three major Allied powers worried lest the public should think this to be the case. Liberation when it came was a by-product of a broader ambition to expel the Axis states from their conquests and to restore the national sovereignty of all conquered and victimized peoples. Towards the Jews, the attitude of the Allied powers was by turns negligent, cautious, ambivalent or morally questionable.

Gideon mouthed a thousand little noes. It was kind of sweet that he thought he could stop me.

My father, an enlightened spirit, believed in man. My grandfather, a fervent Hasid, believed in God. The one taught me to speak, the other to sing. Both loved stories. And when I tell mine, I hear their voices. Whispering from beyond the silenced storm, they are what links the survivor to their memory.

It is not so easy to move on when your sleep is full of nightmarish memories.

I have asked the doctor at the kibbutz, many times, to explain the difference between a night memory and a day memory. Doctor, tell me, how am I able to go about my tasks during the day not thinking once about that time, but at night it rises like a monster from the sea? It is so terrifying that I must sleep with a light on. He gives me pills because he has no answer.

Romanian psychologist Ioana Cosman interviewed twenty-two Holocaust survivors and found a sharp contrast in their dream lives during and after the war. While they were in the camps, their dreams “presented . . . brighter and happier scenes.” It was only after they had been released—physically if not mentally—that their dreams took on “a darker and horrific form,” replaying gruesome scenes from the war or tormenting them with visions of family members who had been killed. Their dreams were adaptive, colluding in their self-preservation—postponing the nightmares until they were ready to confront their worst memories.

I have asked the doctor at the kibbutz, many times, to explain the difference between a night memory and a day memory. Docter, tell me, how am I able to go about my tasks during the day not thinking once about that time, but at night it rises like a monster from the sea? It is so terrifying that I must sleep with a light on. He gives me pills because he has no answer.

The relationship became so close by the mid-1970s that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster to visit, including a tour of Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Vorster had been a Nazi sympathizer and member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War II. In 1942, he proudly expressed his admiration for Nazi Germany. Yet when Vorster arrived in Israel in 1976, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence.” Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” A few months after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same challenge: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”6 The relationship between the nations was broad but also sworn to secrecy. In April 1975, a security agreement was signed that defined the relationship for the next twenty years. A clause within the deal stated that both parties pledged to keep its existence concealed.

les livres sont faits pour ça, nous empêcher d'oublier.

Adorno has here articulated the central contradiction—he calls it an “aporia”—inherent in all Holocaust memorials: legitimate art after Auschwitz must represent, translate, or in some way evoke the violence done to victims in a form that is legible to posterity. But to instrumentalize or aestheticize the victims’ memory is necessarily to violate it. In these terms a “true” memorial must accomplish the impossible: communicate the event while preserving its utter inscrutability, honor the victims while rejecting any and all ascriptions of meaning.

Indeed, experiencing Survivor or any other kindred musical memorial—in the fullness of what they have to offer—requires a different modality of listening. We are there not to be entertained but to bear witness to the music’s own testimony,

one century before Schoenberg’s birth when Moses Mendelssohn first entered the gates of Berlin—from the emancipation of the Jews, to the emancipation of dissonance, to the emancipation of memory.

Speech itself has been superseded by song just as memory “dilates” itself, as if leaping from the domain of history (a narrated sequence of events) to the transcendent register of faith.

Even now,” says the title character in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, “when I try to remember…the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

Quite a bit more than preponderance of recent neurological and psychiatric research has found that traumatic memories are no more fragmented or elusive than any other type of memory.18 In fact, studies on Holocaust victims and soldiers suffering from PTSD show quite the opposite. Trauma actually heightens memories—the recollections stay sharper, becoming intrusive and hard to forget, even though subjects wish they could.

While I sat in back in the dark, snug and comfortable, my aunt had several removes lectured me: “You have to erase from your memory everything that happened in Europe. You have to make a new beginning. You have to forget what they did to you. Wipe it off like chalk from a blackboard.” And to make me understand better, she gestured as if wiping a board with a sponge. I thought, she wants me to get rid of the only thing that I own for sure: my life, that is, the years I have lived. But you can't throw away your life like old clothing, as if you had another outfit in the closet. Would she want to wipe away her own childhood? I have the one I have, and she has a different one – I can't invent one for myself that's more respectable. Struggling with foreign words that seemed to lurk behind seven veils, I told her why I had to reject this invitation to betray my people, my dead. The language was recalcitrant. My aunt hardly listened to my alien gibberish.

At the first Holocaust memorial commemoration in the Capitol Rotunda, both President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Mondale referred to the ‘eleven million victims.’ Carter also used Wiesenthal’s figures of ‘six million Jews and five million others’ in his Executive Order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. I have attended Holocaust memorial commemorations in places as diverse as synagogues and army forts where eleven candles were lit. More significant is that strangers have repeatedly taken me and other colleagues to task for ignoring the five million non-Jews. When I explain that this is an invented concept, they become convinced of my ethnocentrism.

There is a psychological dimension to the deniers’ and minimizers’ objectives: The general public tends to accord victims of genocide a certain moral authority. If you devictimize a people you strip them of their moral authority, and if you can in turn claim to be a victim, as the Poles and Austrians often try to do, that moral authority is conferred on or restored to you. -- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, pages 7-8

The various Eichmann testimonies are truly staggering in their total volume. But how, if at all, can they be used? Even more than most memoirs, the Eichmann testimonies, both before and after capture, are consciously calculated attempts at self-representation, self-justification, and legal defense. It must be said as emphatically perpetrator testimony as possible that, at the core of these testimonies, there are three monstrous falsehoods that are central to his whole enterprise. -- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 8-9.

Clearly anyone who wants to dismiss Eichmann’s testimonies on the grounds of their demonstrated unreliability and shameless self-serving lies can easily do so, and many of my colleagues have done precisely this. But what if our default position is not to dismiss everything Eichmann said and wrote just because he was lying most of the time, but rather to ask what among this mass of lies might nonetheless be of help to the historian, given his unique vantage point and the sheer volume of his testimony? -- Collected Memories: Holocaust and Postwar Testimony, page 11

As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze was saying more that that.

We have also finally become aware that something is indeed wrong with most “grand narratives” or upward generalizations. Too much death and suffering accompany these comprehensive and often grandiose ideologies. No wonder that within the Holocaust trauma-drama there lodges a radical—and completely rational—suspicion concerning the demagogic abuse of collective superstitions often accompanying such schemes. There is, in particular, a bitter memory of the pernicious power of stereotypes.

All right. When I was hiding in a small town in Poland with my mother, of course I didn’t have many toys. In fact, I had only two—a doll and a little bear I later named Refugee. He was one of those Steiff bears, but he stayed with me after the war and into adulthood and now he’s in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The copy they made of him to sell in the gift shop is one of their most popular items.

At the Evian conference in July 1938, which failed to offer help to Germany’s persecuted Jews, it was the Australian representative Thomas White who made the most callous remark: ‘As we have no racial problem we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.’ A short version of the quote is displayed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Australia’s narrow-mindedness juxtaposed with the souls of six million dead.

Music has no interior beacon that guarantees permanent meaning. Unlike truth, which is transcultural, absolute, and unchangeable, music can shift in meaning from place to place and time to time. Of all the art forms, music is inherently the most flexible. The music of Bach, as deeply fixed within the churchly contexts of his time and ours, can still shift meanings while remaining great music in its own right. For Lutherans it is church music, par excellence. For the young convert from Satanism, it was evil. In its original form, the tune “Austria” was the imperial national anthem, “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,” composed by Haydn. He then used it as the principal theme for the slow movement in his Emperor Quartet. In this guise it reflects the essentially secular contexts for which it was written and is perfectly at home in the concert hall. It is also the tune for “Deutschland über Alles,” the German national anthem. And for Jewish people, it is associated with the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust. And finally, it is the tune to which the hymn “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” is sung in virtually all American churches. To American Christians this tune’s primary meaning is “sacred.” To them, it carries virtually none of its first two meanings, unless one or the other was impressed first into their memories. There is no way to explain this phenomenon other than that music, as music, is completely relative.

The sea of excited people, the flood of colored lights, and the unending stream of cars were proof that the days of the Holocaust were now part of the history books. I awakened from my horrible memories and almost agreed with the opinion voiced by many that the ghetto was a dead issue and the whole period surrounding it too far-fetched, too cruelly-sadistic, to be believable today, assuming it really existed.... The reign of man-eating furnaces is hard for a reasonable mind to grasp, even that of someone who was a victim himself.