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Yom HaShoah: The Changes in Memory

And so, not to put too fine a point on it, in 1945 and the years immediately following there was no such word as \"Holocaust.\"
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April 27, 2000

It is 55 years now — a long time given our own life span — since the Nazi concentration camps were liberated and those tortured photographs of the living and the dead were first shown to us. Even in the midst of a world war where the escalating death count was part of our annual calendar, those pictures seemed beyond our comprehension. It was almost as though we were unwilling to accept that we had lived in such a time, and so were reluctant to bear witness. You could say that many of our parents and relatives turned their back on this so recent memory.

And so, not to put too fine a point on it, in 1945 and the years immediately following there was no such word as “Holocaust.” In the United States there were no Holocaust museums, no mass public occasions in which we came together (as we do this Sunday in Pan Pacific Park) to honor those 6 million who died. There was no remembering. Only silence.

On the part of many (though not all) Americans, I think there was a certain embarrassment: At our avoidance and our ignorance; at our looking the other way while all this was happening. Were we complicit? Was there more we could have done? Looking back with hindsight, it appears to me that we were ashamed: First, of our own failed behavior, and then, shifting blame, of those sad victims who had perished in the death camps. They were not American Jews, and some of us were reluctant to identify with them.

Philip Roth caught this scathingly in one of his early short stories, “Eli the Fanatic,” written around 1959. The upper middle-class Jews newly arrived in Scarsdale, N.Y., until then a gentile bastion, are demoralized when a survivor in black hat and Chassidic dress arrives in their midst intent on establishing a yeshiva. The very first thing they decide is that he must be persuaded to shave off his beard, conceal his tattooed numbers and trade in his black hat and coat for a Brooks Brothers suit. The story was devastating, but was played for comic effect. It did not sit well with many American Jewish readers at the time.

The survivors, those immigrants who managed to reach our shores, for the most part adopted a policy of remaining quiet. How could Americans, of all people, untouched by bombs, occupation or the presence of German soldiers, understand what they had suffered? It was beyond comprehending, and so beyond explaining. Moreover, who wanted to speak of those days and nights? Of the daily horrors? The death of family and friends? If nothing else, there was a reluctance to share recollections of pain, humiliation and degradation. Few of us, in the best of circumstances, in the midst of those we hold dearest, are willing to unburden ourselves in this way.

And so we all lived with this conspiracy of silence. A story told by writer Dorothy Rabinowitz suggests this vividly. She relates how a survivor attending a dance in San Francisco noticed one man in the room staring curiously at her from time to time; finally he came over, introduced himself, and confessed that he had seen the numbers on her arm. “I was wondering,” he said, “why you were wearing your laundry numbers on your arm?” What were they really, he wanted to know, some sort of decoration? “I told him, no, that’s my telephone number.” (From “New Lives. Survivors of the Holocaust Living in America,” p. 196. Published in 1977.)

How did we travel from there to here? Today we have a national Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., perched not too far from the Washington Monument. There are Holocaust centers and museums in an increasing number of American cities. In Los Angeles itself, we have three monuments and museums, plus Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation which is amassing a vast library of taped accounts by survivors. Indeed, the Holocaust, an act of genocide directed against European Jewry, has become a central part of American life, almost as though it had occurred on our own soil, had devastated our own citizens. It has become part of American history and is embraced as an American myth — in classrooms and in the Holocaust museums — by non-Jews as well as by the large extended family of American Jewry.

It would seem that memory and the act of remembering itself have undergone change. How to pinpoint the causes of that change? Part has to do with the historical details of life. There was the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961, when one man and woman after another took the witness stand in Jerusalem and shattered the silence that had enveloped the Holocaust until that moment. Then the coming of age of the Second Generation and, indeed, of the entire next two generations of American Jews, who took advantage of the doors that had begun to open for them in American society. If nothing else, they had distance from the Holocaust. Remembering was not connected for them to the failure of responsibility. And of course there was the Six-Day War, which overnight catapulted Jews from being victims to warriors. Not to be dismissed either was our own Vietnam war. All of us bore witness to the deaths of millions of Vietnamese alongside 58,000 Americans. It is almost as though the Vietnam Memorial in Washington opened the gates for the Holocaust Memorial in our nation’s capitol.

Nor should the role of mass media be ignored. French director Alain Resnais made a searing documentary film about the Holocaust, “Night and Fog.” To be sure it was in French and a work of art, and so reached a relatively small audience. But it was soon followed by Hollywood films like “Exodus” (and the novel by Leon Uris), which affected a mass audience, and even though the subject was the founding of the Jewish state, its narrative was broad enough to encompass references to the Holocaust.

Perhaps most telling of all was the 1978 television mini-series on the Holocaust that became a Jewish equivalent of the preceding year’s “Roots,” which served as a defining point of identity for Black Americans. Indirectly, and perhaps imperceptibly, it converted the Holocaust into an European-American story. It helped shift the locus of what it meant “to be Jewish” for many Americans. Now to be identified as Jewish, for many meant claiming an ethnic rather than a religious identity. Finally there was this decade’s capstone, “Schindler’s List,” directed by Steven Spielberg, which led directly to the Shoah Center, in part because of the profits from the film. Where does media end and reality begin? They have become twined, I would argue, indistinguishable from one another.

Some of this popular culture — the numerous television dramas, “Exodus,” Superman traveling back to the Warsaw ghetto, a popular Holocaust cookbook, even “Schindler’s List” — lend more than a dollop of sentimentality to the Holocaust.They transform the past. They convert (inadvertently) the mass visits to a Holocaust museum into tourist attractions alongside of Disneyland and Universal Studios.

But only purists could object, I think. For the sentimentalizing has made the memory more accessible — to survivors as well as the rest of us. It has helped unseal their past, so that words and tears and the act of remembering itself have become part of our shared experience. It is not unreasonable to say that flawed commercial packages have elicited from us quite powerful and truthful historical moments.

If memory has been so protean, has been such a pawn of time and generational change, what can we say about the Holocaust in an American future? That its narrative shape and impact will change seems likely to me. Just as memories of the Civil War and World War I have receded, will that not occur here, too, as the last of the survivors disappears from the scene?

There are many among of us who have dedicated their lives to seeing that that will not happen. But it will take more than monuments and museums to keep such a memory alive. It will require passing the stories along, one generation to the next, within families, schools and the wider culture. It will require that we reimagine the nightmare lived by others, one generation after another. Not an easy task. In this way, the memory of the Holocaust will undergo change again, and then again and again. — Gene Lichtenstein

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