Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked to recall the herding and murder of six million Jews, taken on the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. There is a fine editorial at Ha'aretz, the liberal Israeli paper, on those who tell Israel, and Jews worldwide, to get over it:

In fact, one of those who chose this Holocaust Remembrance Day to tell us to get on with our lives was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

With exquisite timing, Ahmadinejad chose the eve of Yom Hashoah to issue his latest advisory, telling the Jews of the Holy Land that they should pack up and move away - to Europe, the place, he says, we all came from.

The president is telling us to get over it as well. Move on. And out. For our own good.

It might be time to break it to Ahmedinajad that most of us didn't come from Europe, and few of us have any interest in living there.

It might be time to break it to our readers who believe that we are as bad as the Nazis, that the compassion showed by individual Israeli officers soldiers in a broad range of contacts with Palestinians often has a great deal to do with the soldiers' consciousness of the Holocaust and of persecution of the Jews.

Anyone who knows this newspaper, knows that it makes great efforts to expose mistreatment of Palestinians by members of the security forces, in an effort to assure that wrongful practices are stopped.

What we do not do, is to do enough to expose and thus encourage the acts of compassion and human generosity that anyone who really knows the IDF, knows is part and parcel of the way the army works.

Some of the most compassionate IDF officers are, in fact, the children and grandchildren of survivors. Hundreds of thousands of them. For them, there is no question of getting over the Holocaust. They will not. For them, every day of their lives is Yom Hashoa. Even after two generations.

It doesn't end, even if you try to make it end. The sins of the Nazis will be visited upon the Jews, perhaps until the tenth generation.

Sixty years on, the Holocaust bears different lessons for all of us. Some believe that the lesson is do unto others before they do unto you. Others believe that the lesson has much more to do with compassion and tolerance even when it may seem undeserved, when the blood cries vengeance. War does that to you. It replaces compassion with hatred.

Just this once, however, it might be time to look at the Holocaust for what it remains - a wound that will never heal, an experience that is beyond our experience, comprehension, or puny, wrongheaded automatic comparisons to current events.

Just this once, after all these years, let us honor the victims and survivors with introspection, with compassion, with modesty, with respect, with awe.

It is often those who advise us to get over a genocide of sixty years ago who turn around and point out how old cultural memories are. We are reminded of the defeat of the Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna, or the expulsion of Muslims from Spain, both centuries gone. And yet, with Holocaust victims still alive, the memory is to be expunged.

I was in a meeting with a client last week. A older woman was present who I thought seemed rather scattered, or rather disconnected. She never looked at anybody straight on, and talked in a halting, painfully quiet manner.

I noticed the numbers on her wrist, first. When she had left, my client explained that she had been a Holocaust victim as a child, losing her family, and finally being discovered by liberating soldiers while she lay surrounded by dead bodies.

We recently celebrated Passover. At the Seder, there was another woman who also spoke in hushed tones, a thick vaguely French accent making conversation a bit labored. However, she is a delightful and gracious person. I know that this woman was hidden by nuns in a Belgian convent during all the years of WWII. She learned not to speak much. And when one must, to keep her voice down.

These women will never get over it. And as the last survivors pass away, we should not let the world get over it, either.

-Daniel

Comments

[Maggie]

Last year you wrote a beautiful post on this subject...I thought then the apex of compassion. Once again, friend, you have surpassed expectations. Thank you.

[Daniel]

Thanks, Maggie.

[shlemazl]

Good blog. Keep it up.

[tigran]

The world does not seem to remember the Armenian genocide or that only one nation aside from Armenia officially recognizes it. Those aged Armenians in Turkey or in Armenia who sit hunched in their chairs have been told to "get over it" by the world and will die soon enough knowing no support. I hope that the continuing thoughts and reminders of the attrocities of WWII will allow people to open up to prior horrors that were equally tragic.