There was a time when it took nothing more than silence to honor the memory of the Holocaust. Members of the “Club of New Americans” (survivors who arrived in Denver in 1946 or shortly thereafter) would duly gather in the Hillel Academy gym and solemnly host the annual remembrance proceedings. There would be a speech in Yiddish. There would be a guest speaker. There would be a lighting of six candles, one survivor per candle.
The speeches were halting, awkward, and not just because the English was a second language. What could they say? What could be added to the necessary silence? Yet, the survivors had to speak, in order to demonstrate their miraculous survival, their new families and their visceral need to remember. Even though the survivors were preaching to the choir, they had to speak, and even though nothing they said could really be understood by others in attendance, they had to speak.Television reporters asked the survivors questions that both the reporters and the survivors knew could not be answered because, paradoxically, the subject was impossibly full.
The annual Holocaust survivors’ remembrance was a vital ritual in the community when there were survivors in the community. Now, we live in a different time. A time for others to speak and speak and speak. A time when silence would do a grave disservice, not because words are any more adequate to the reality than they ever were, but because the reality is, hard as it is to believe by descendants of survivors and anyone else over a certain age, receding from collective memory. Vanishing. Melding into the distant past. Indistinct (especially given the post-Holocaust genocides) and undifferentiated in the popular mind from every contemporary malady.
If only for historical accuracy, not to mention historical warning, it is imperative to speak and speak and speak. It is imperative on all of us. Survivors? There are only a precious few now; the once vibrant survivor community is no longer a distinct cohort and no longer commands center stage in Holocaust remembrance. Descendants of survivors —“Second Generation,” “Third Generation?” It is no more their responsibility to speak about the Holocaust than all other Jews’. Now, as always, the historical memory of the Jewish people is to be cradled within every Jew. We are all survivors of the destruction of the First Temple and the Second Temple; on exactly the same basis of collective identity and commitment, so too are we, and will our descendants be, all survivors of the Holocaust.
More and more we will need to speak in ritual. Memoirs of the Holocaust seem endless and recorded memories of survivors are in the tens of thousands and the names of the victims recorded at Yad Vashem are now in the millions; even so, all these will not primarily carry the memory into the future. Memoirs and visual images carry us — we now viscerally see — only so far, in the absence of the living survivors behind them, or alongside them.
Ritual we will increasingly need, and ritual we increasingly have. On the ninth of Av — Tisha b’Av — even twenty years ago the mournful Kinot were printed almost entirely without reference to the Holocaust. No more. First there was one kinah penned in memory of the Holocaust victims; then two; then three. We imagine they shall keep coming. As they should and as they must, since the only way we shall speak to the future generations, the distant generations, the generations that will have known no survivor and no “Second Generation” and no “Third Generation,” is through the fixed ritual of Tisha b’Av and its preceding three weeks of mourning. This is because the Holocaust will, as it already slowly is, assume its place in the historical line of all Jewish tragedy.
Less and less are the voices clamoring for the unique memory of the Holocaust being sounded. More and more are all voices clamoring for remembrance of the Holocaust tapering off, so that the millennium-plus fixed framework of watershed Jewish-tragedy remembrance will emerge as the focus of Holocaust remembrance.
Separate Holocaust remembrance events are still with us, but what does it say the ADL says of its own Holocaust remembrance event (this year, April 19) that it is one of the largest in the country? It says that separate Holocaust events are going the way of the survivors themselves.
The increasing incorporation of Holocaust remembrance into time-honored Jewish rituals is, of course, for Jews. For the world, which must remember the beyond-words brutality for its own future, for its own safety, it is words and words and more words that now become imperative. More courses in schools and more studies in universities. More public lectures. More essays in newspapers and magazines. More speech!
All this, however, will neither preserve the memory of the Holocaust nor help preserve the safety of society if Holocaust education is diluted and universalized — if the courses in the Holocaust do not not starkly face the fundamental fact that the Nazis were fanatically bent on exterminating one single people. Yes, the Nazis murdered others, but — certainly meaning no disrespect for any murdered human being — for the Nazis their murder of non-Jews was a side show in idea, in quantity and in method.
We offer here no special pleading, no search for privileged victimhood. We fully acknowledge other genocides. Rather, we highlight just this: It is critically important to face the utter, fanatic, irrational Nazi focus on the extermination of one single people in order to recognize the reemergence of any such total evil again.
If all of the Nazi evils are mixed in with the Nazi Holocaust — with the mobile gas-killing vans, with the massive killing pits, with the gas chambers, with the crematoria, with the utter Nazi fanaticism — then the chances of recognizing any such evil goal in the future are radically reduced, especially since any such future, fanatical, genocidal effort is likely never to be clothed in these Nazi methods again.
So, we are left, Jews and non-Jews alike, with the need to speak and speak and speak. Ritually. Educationally. Factually. Repeatedly.
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