WHETHER you know it or not, if youre over 15 and youve spent a little time in the Jewish community, you will acquire a special status. As you grow older, you will be looked up to as a person of wisdom.
Or, tragically, you might need to convince everyone younger than you of your special status.
You see, one day you will be able to say: I personally knew a Holocaust survivor.
Meaning, of course, that the younger people you meet will not be able to say that. They will never have known a single person who survived the Holocaust.
That you will be different should confer a special status. Whether it will, remains to be seen.
Either way, you will be troubled. You will try to describe what it was like to talk to a person who, say, survived Auschwitz, and you will have a hard time.
Either you can describe one person, which is always difficult, or you will be forced to generalize.
How do you generalize about people about whom the only commonality is the label, extraordinary sufferer?
The living flesh will be gone. The diversity of the Holocaust experience will be an abstraction. The fact that some survivors came out with their faith crushed, or fortified; that some survivors spoke openly about their experiences, some not at all; that these and many other distinctions will be separated from the living flesh will frustrate your communication of hard-earned wisdom picked up from knowing actual survivors.
WELCOME to the club of transition figures, of people who live in more than one culture. Of course, your participation in the culture of the survivor is vicarious, but if you have spent even a moderate amount of time speaking to or observing survivors, you have absorbed a lot. Youre not like most other Americans. You have a level of wisdom that may be hard to pin down, to define, to communicate, but you have it.
It will be up to all of us who have it to continue to tell the story, to keep the memory alive.
Somehow, I think that all of the Holocaust memorials will not help us much. For it is a very human encounter, a direct absorption of unique memories, a personal sense of pain and wonderment, that gives us the status of people who carry a personal link to the survivors.
Of course, at some future point, even we, who knew the survivors, will be gone, and even our mediated knowledge will no longer exist. The Holocaust will be pure history. Books. Maps. Photo albums. Recordings. All very powerful, perhaps; but strictly of the past.
Just like the Armenian genocide, of which there is not likely single survivor and very few, if any, who knew a survivor.
What all this argues for, in my view, is not still another Holocaust museum, or still another Holocaust history book, or still another Holocaust memoir (though each is precious and powerful), but a deeper, more pervasive sense of what it is to be a Jew.
In the end, it is the quality of ones life as a Jew that will determine to what extent, if any, the memory of the Holocaust will be sustained.
Judaism is deeply engaged in memory. For example, how pervasively one remembers the Exodus from Egypt yearly, at Passover; or daily, from reading the story in the daily prayer book will determine the extent of the memory of the Holocaust.
Does one remember the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the expulsion from Spain on Tisha bAv? If so, the habit and the process of remembering Jewish suffering is built into ones identity as a Jew. That will carry over to Holocaust remembrance.
What will not carry over is the profound, indeed, uncontainably immense emotion of the survivor. It will be gone. It will not play a role.
A HEAVY burdens falls on we who have known, and still know, Holocaust survivors personally.
Above, I spoke of the age of 15 as, more or less, the lower limit of someone still able to know a Holocaust survivor well. As for the upper limit, people who have known survivors for years or decades know that the survivor community is drastically thinning out.
By now, many of us can identity the particular survivor from whom we learned the most past tense.
Many of us can remember the Holocaust memorial events at which we were the distinct minority, while the ratio now is 20 or 30 of us for each survivor present.
Ably or awkwardly, successfully or not, survivors have fulfilled their role. Blessedly, there remain a few who still do. But the duty now substantially falls to us, to the people who can say, I knew Holocaust survivors personally.
This duty is a heavy responsibility. It bears thought. Its fulfillment is not automatic.
