The week after Passover is always Holocaust Memorial week. It’s almost as if the moment Passover is sealed, people dusts off their physical or mental photos or memories, bringing them into sharper focus, sharing their own personal Holocaust links and stories of loved ones.
By the time the official Holocaust Memorial Day is marked — this year in Israel, the evening of April 27 through April 28 — it is overflowing with layers of people and vignettes, these days mostly passed on by children and grandchildren.
Holocaust Memorial week is its own sacred day and time, to pause and reflect on history’s worst genocide and horror, to which we have and feel personal links.
To be sure, the phenomena of the mass murder of Jews is sadly not new. Passover commemorates an attempted genocide of the Jewish people. Other attempts have followed throughout the course of Jewish history. While other people and races have not been targeted as frequently as the Jews, attempted genocides of others have plagued the world. A recent tragedy that comes to mind is the Yazidis.
Just the other day, April 24, marked the 107th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. History has shown that Hitler was inspired by the Armenian genocide, going so far as to make this chilling statement: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
While I believe that at this juncture in time — and perhaps in perpetuity — the horror of the Holocaust is unique, the idea of decimating a people to the world’s indifference, doing nothing, is, though obscene, not new. Genocide is humanity at its most flawed.
I don’t believe in diluting Holocaust Memorial week with every ill in the world. It should stand alone. The magnitude of the horror unleashed on the Jewish people and an entire continent should be commemorated in a way that honors this particular moment in history.
Yet, this year, as the wrenching images of Ukrainians suffering assault us in the news, it’s hard for it not to mentally collide with Holocaust Memorial Day. “Never Again” means that we will never allow a horror of the Holocaust’s magnitude ever to happen again. The magnitude comprised of the increments, the piecemeals, the different levels and layers, that led to the swelling, the snowballing, the ultimately unthinkable, the totality of the Holocaust — the labor camps, the ghettoizing of Jews, the killing pits, the death camps, the death marches, the Muselmänner, Jews who were so defeated by starvation, more dead than alive, resigned themselves to the gas chambers . . . the list of the unthinkable crimes of the Nazis goes on.
This is humanity’s new line in the sand. The world won’t allow Holocaust paradigm levels horrors to happen again. However, many of the preceding steps — refugees in the millions, butchering of small towns, bombed out cities — all in a country that was attacked unprovoked — this not only can happen again but is happening again, right before our eyes. So while I believe Holocaust Memorial Day stands on its own, it’s almost impossible not to see current events intertwined with the memory of the Holocaust.
I have spoken with a few elderly Holocaust survivors whose families were brutally destroyed in Ukraine — by bloodthirsty Ukrainians. They struggle with finding empathy for Ukraine as a country. After what they lived through, I can understand it. It’s not a matter of Schadenfreude. There is no gladness. Yet it’s hard for them to muster the sympathy for Ukraine even as the country destroyed — and even as they reiterate that the lives of innocent Ukrainians should be spared.
What is happening in Ukraine can be conflated with the Holocaust, and yet so far they are very different and I pray this will remain so, without the brutality unleashed on Ukraine not descending into further calamities.
Especially as the Holocaust survivors amongst us dwindle, now more than ever we are obligated to hold the space of the memory of the Holocaust in its unique horror, honoring its painfully sacred legacy, that is like no other. Equally, we are obligated to redouble our efforts to ensure that our world keeps things in check, so that we can always say that the Holocaust remains like no other human suffering.
If we can continue to say the Holocaust is unique, it means we have at least partially discharged our obligation of humanity to ensure horrors of that paradigm and depth are not repeated.
Yet, using the benchmark of the Holocaust, which felt like humanity stopped in time, leaves a terrible vacuum for so much horror still to transpire.
Therefore, I think, on the one hand, the comparison of current events to the Holocaust spurred the world to step up to the plate, to and ensure humanitarian help in the Ukraine and elsewhere; but, on the other hand, the comparison can also sometimes lead to minimizing human grievances, agonies and abuses, just because they have not reached the depth of the Holocaust horror. Still, they remain damning and demand profound intervention and collective responsibility.
To me, Holocaust Memorial week remains sacred in its Jewish intimacy and memory of my own personal ancestors who were murdered, and of the ancestors of others in my community who were murdered, as part of an effort to erase the Jewish people from the world. Most tangibly, Holocaust Memorial week is a time I remember the survivors I was blessed to have held in emotional closeness and love.
This is the time to take a deeper look at those very few, surviving black-and-white, creased photos of eyes that eerily gaze out at us, for their knowledge of the evil that our families were crushed under, as the world remained silent and indifferent.
The Holocaust is a trauma that reverberates through time. Yet, it is precisely this awareness that, like a black-and-white photo, provides the lens of negative space with which to perceive the shades of other unbearable tragedies that still plague our world.
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