Centre Daily Times, PA
Dec 4 2004
Who will speak for the victims, and what shall be said?
What will we say for them? When there are no more survivors of the
Holocaust, what will we speak in their spirit?
What will we say in their voices through our voices? How will we make
them live, when most of them are dying, now, or have died before
their time? How can we make them live for all time, this generation
that is dying?
Noted historian Howard Zinn says this of the Holocaust: “The greatest
gift the Jews could give the world is not to remember Hitler’s
genocide for exactly what it was, that is, the genocide of Jews, but
to take what that horrible experience was for Jews and then to apply
it to all other things that are going on in the world, where huge
numbers of people are dying for absolutely no reason at all.”
Then we must ask, if given back their life, their health, their
energy, their hunger for understanding and peace, what would the
victims of the Holocaust say of the holocausts of today, of the
anti-Semitism of today, and what would they say, of the words that
are now spoken for them, of the words their memory brings?
Indeed, it is true today that the world is experiencing a new wave of
anti-Semitism, unmatched, some could say, since the Holocaust itself.
This new energy in anti-Semitic feeling has sometimes been attributed
to Holocaust denial, Holocaust forgetting, and it is more than ironic
that along with passionate anti-Semitism, a new wave of Holocaust
interest has emerged, particularly in the United States, where as
many as 140,000 Holocaust survivors immigrated after 1948.
Because a people dead, a generation dead, voices gone or never heard,
are things very easily manipulated.
First, why is the Holocaust unique? And why does it continue to
affect us?
Noted perhaps for its technological thoroughness, it is obviously a
horror of our time, but certainly, not the horror of all times. Have
we not seen such disregard for human life in the Armenian genocide,
in the Cambodian killing fields, in the slaughter in Bosnia and
Rwanda, and most recently, and perhaps most relevantly, in Israel’s
occupation of Palestine?
And to make Americans blush, can we not forget that Hitler’s own
inspiration lay in his knowledge, in what he believed was the
absolute genocide of Native Americans by the growing United States,
and the absolute forgetting of this? Can Americans not see the loss
when something like this is forgotten?
We must imagine what Holocaust survivors would say about any of these
terrors — Holocaust survivors of course meaning more than Jews —
because we know that gypsies, Russians, homosexuals, the disabled and
more perished under the Nazis. But what we are really asking is what
exactly is it that a victim would say to another victim?
Would they not just give knowing glances and wish, wishing very hard,
that maybe that their own personal terror really had been unique?
That with their suffering, perhaps it was the end to all needless
suffering. Perhaps this thought process is naive, but I think some
victims, and all who remember victims well, emerge a bit naive, a bit
idealistic perhaps, a bit wonderfully, idealistic.
Finkelstein speaks firmly of how he believes the Holocaust is
exploited, through political and class interests, along with the
insistence of portraying Jews as the sole victims. And more
importantly, he believes the Holocaust is being generally used today
to rationalize Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians.
He stipulates further that the Holocaust was met mostly with
indifference in the United States, only until Israel became fully
entrenched as a U.S. ally after the 1967 war when Israel began
occupying Sinai, West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights.
We must ask then how Holocaust victims themselves would feel about
having the memory of their suffering exploited in such a way, in the
interest of deflecting criticism of Israel. How despite a common
heritage with this nation, we must hope — no, we must have absolute
faith — that these survivors would, have, and will (if there are any
still alive and able) speak out against any atrocity they see.
Albert Camus said that it is the job of the thinking people not to be
on the side of the executioners. If anything, being a victim or being
in any way influenced by the Holocaust, or by any holocaust, should
produce this identity, not necessarily an identity as a victim, but
to have an identity that is based on the ability to identify and act
out against oppressors.
We must continue to insist that the victims and survivors of the
Holocaust, and the victims of any holocaust, would be most pleased,
most honored, most correctly spoken for when and in the day that we
will denounce all violence.
We must apply their voices and their suffering into defending all who
will ever be threatened with such cruelty.
And we must know that the fact that the Jewish people were
slaughtered and oppressed by the Nazis cannot ever be used to
legitimize any violence or hostility toward other nations (for
example, Palestine).
We should restore Holocaust interest to either scholarly or
humanitarian. And we should always remember cases like this — cases
for example, when Israeli Justice Minister Yusef Lapid, a Holocaust
survivor himself, looked upon a picture of an old Palestinian woman
sitting on the rubble of what used to be her home, and Lapid admitted
quite candidly that it reminded him of his own grandmother in the
Holocaust.
We must remember this, and realize where the real connections lie,
not in race or ethnicity, but in bonds of understanding and a belief
in a common good.
Grace Kredell is a student in the State College Area High School
Delta Program. This essay won first place for 11th-grade students in
the recent Voices of the Holocaust Essay Contest sponsored by the
State College Choral Society.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress