As We Commemorate Holocaust Remembrance, Let’s Remember the Memory Workers

This week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the ‘memory workers’ are hard at work. The term ‘memory worker’ is not one you are likely to know, but memory workers are all around you. They are voluntary representatives of those victimized by violence or persecution. They take on the burden of conveying the pain, even though it is not their trauma to carry.

Iris Chang, author of “The Rape of Nanking,” was a memory worker. She told a story of 300,000 Chinese civilians who were murdered by the Japanese from December 1937 through early 1938. It was a history that was not her own. She paid the ultimate price through the impact on her mental health and her ultimate death by suicide.

Anna Rosmus, the young woman depicted in the 1990 film “The Nasty Girl,” is another memory worker. As a young woman in the 1970’s she confronted the history of her town of Passau, Germany, during the Nazi era. She paid through years of intimidation, just for telling the truth.

Kim Simon is a memory worker too. She coined the term in order to describe those who work in Holocaust memory and education. In 1994 after Steven Spielberg received the Academy Award for Best Picture for Schindler’s List, he called on the world to teach about the Holocaust. Among those who answered the call was 24-year-old Kim Simon, neé Hillman. After a short stint in Prague in the post Soviet period Kim ended up back in Los Angeles where she first volunteered, and then became a member of staff of what is now USC Shoah Foundation. When I arrived in LA in 2009 she was there to greet me. 

“These memories are toxic,” she told me, “somehow they get inside you.”

We live in a culture of easy memory. Around us are fragments of forgotten and bloody pasts. We give them artistic form and put them in parks. The monuments mean a lot to the families, but most passersby do not know their meaning.

We live in a culture of easy memory. Around us are fragments of forgotten and bloody pasts. We give them artistic form and put them in parks. The monuments mean a lot to the families, but most passers-by do not know their meaning. Holocaust Museum LA is a good example of a deeply meaningful memorial that intersects with basketball and dog-walkers. Other examples include the memorial to the fallen soldiers of the Vietnam war who are individually named on the Mall in Washington DC. and the Twin Towers which are memorialized in lower Manhattan by forbidding holes, surrounded by names of the lost. Their names are there, but even the families struggle to keep up with traumatic memory.

My friend is a third generation Holocaust survivor. “I am feeling guilty,” she told me. “I have spent fifteen years telling my grandmother’s story.  Now I need a break. It does not seem healthy any more.” She spent New Year’s in urgent care, burned out. “It’s just so lonely bearing the weight of 6 million souls that I cannot bring back!” Nor should she feel she has to.

My own burnout happened after fifteen years of memory work, daily listening to stories about the Holocaust and Rwanda. After many sleepless nights, my body and spirit could take no more.

‘It gets into your system.” Kim has seen enough to know. “The divorces, disabilities, and even deaths are disproportionate!’ she pointed it out to me almost a decade ago. She is not wrong. I had one divorce and one heart attack by fifty. I was not alone. My wife Heather, another memory worker, went through a divorce, then had a pulmonary embolism immediately after visiting the National Genocide Memorial in Armenia.

Over the last thirty years Kim Simon has been a fighter for Holocaust memory. Like many memory workers her contribution has been quiet but profound. She was a leader at USC Shoah Foundation for over two decades. On any given day you would find her at the United Nations, UNESCO, in Rwanda or China, fighting for memory and truth. It takes strength to be a bearer of memory.

As I write this I am sitting with Kim, who at 52 is intubated and wired to every device imaginable at Cedars Sinai ICU. She taps slowly on her iPad to tell me that just last week she was wrongly pronounced dead. For the last five years she has lived with Multiple System Atrophy, a little known neurological degenerative disease.

We hold hands as the monitors quietly beep. Kim has fought for memory until her dying day.  I ask her if it is OK for me to continue her work to reveal more about how genocide effects those who touch it.  She puts up her thumb.

We hold hands as the monitors quietly beep. Kim has fought for memory until her dying day.  I ask her if it is OK for me to continue her work to reveal more about how genocide effects those who touch it.  She puts up her thumb. Her words haunt me – it’s toxic. I wonder whether she is paying the ultimate price that memory can exact.

Stephen D. Smith is CEO of StoryFile and Executive Director Emeritus at USC Shoah Foundation.