Sometimes a headline is so trenchant that you almost don’t need to read the story. The Denver Post offered a brilliant example this week: “When only the stones will speak.”
The story was about the death of the last survivor of the revolt at Treblinka [see Page 1, this week’s IJN]. The referenced stones were headstones. And so it is. There are so many among our Jewish youth who have never met or heard a Holocaust survivor. For those of us who have known and heard them, it is frightening to confront the end of this era. As it was put in the AP story in the Post: “Historians and educators prepare for a world without survivors and the challenge of maintaining the memory of the Nazi genocide without the aid of those who witnessed it.”
Survivors’ memories were not perfect and the Nazi genocide will never be forgotten as long as human beings tread this earth. Nonetheless, there is something qualitatively debilitating about contemplating the Holocaust — its scope, its absoluteness, its descent into utter inhumanity, its utter racism, its sheer unbelievableness — without the direct testimony to it all. With the survivors, the Holocaust retains a sense of directness and reality to those who come after. Without survivors, the Holocaust is but another piece of history, albeit an especially difficult one.
True enough, we remember people lost long ago through volitional acts of remembrance — mothers, fathers, grandparents; Civil War veterans, every one of whom is dead. We remember and relive their stories via books, films and other ways.
However, we worry about the ease with which the Holocaust will be put to use in ways that violate it, or will be overlooked, or will be denied, or will be demeaned, because there will be no more survivors — no one left with that credibility without which the world will never see the Holocaust the same way.
As readers of this page know, we have long argued that without incorporating remembrance of the Holocaust into a permanent marker on the Jewish calendar — Tisha b’Av — memory of the Holocaust will fade. All the Holocaust memorials and remembrances will —absent the Holocaust survivors — not equal the power of almost 2,000 years of remembrance of Jewish tragedy that Tisha b’Av captures.
Meanwhile, it behooves all of us, of all ages, to listen to the few remaining survivors among us in order to fortify, while we can, the sense of direct contact with the event for the future. The responsibility lies with us.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
