From the well-chosen – as usual – words from Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, tothe tortured – as usual – face of Eli Wiesel, the Holocaust professional, it was an appropriatecommemoration of the historic crime.
But it was also a great victory for Israeli diplomacy. The chiefs of our Foreign Office openlyboasted of this political achievement. The foreign guests met with the Israeli leaders andthus lent their indirect but clear support to Ariel Sharon’s policy.
Altogether, it underlined the ambiguity of the Holocaust commemoration at this time.
When one of the leading Nazis imprisoned in Nuremberg first learned the full dimensions of theHolocaust, he exclaimed: “This will not be forgotten for a thousand years!” He was right. TheHolocaust was indeed a unique crime in history.
It is difficult for foreigners to understand that for us in Israel the Shoah is not just a thingof the past. It is a part of the present. An example: at the time of the museum opening, I wasflying back from Europe. In the airplane I got into conversation with an Israeli professor Ihad not known before, and he told me about the various stages of his life. I noticed that hepassed quickly over several years of his childhood. When I asked him, be told me that he had beenin Theresienstadt. He did not go into detail, so I did not ask what happened to his family.
From the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, most prisoners were sent on to the deathcamps. My aunt committed suicide there, her husband was sent from there to Auschwitz and wasnever heard of again. I remember this uncle laughing when my father decided to flee fromGermany in 1933. “What can happen to us here?” he asked, “After all, Germany is a civilizedcountry!”
The impact of the Holocaust is not restricted to the generation of the survivors. A youngwriter once told me that both her parents had spent time in the death camps. “I did not knowthat,” she recounted, “They never spoke about it. But when I was a child, I knew there was anawful secret in our family, a secret so terrible that it was forbidden to ask about it. Thatfilled my whole childhood world with dread. Even now I still feel anxious and insecure.”
Almost every day we hear stories that are connected with the Shoah. One cannot escape it. Oneshould not try to escape it, either. Forgetting the Holocaust is a kind of betrayal of thevictims.
The question is: HOW to remember? WHAT to remember?
After World War II, the Shoah became the center of Jewish consciousness. YeshayahuLeibovitz, the philosopher who was an observant orthodox Jew, told me once: “The Jewishreligion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apartfrom the Holocaust.” That is natural, because every Jew knows that if he had fallen into thehands of the Nazis, his life would probably have ended in a gas chamber. We, in Palestine at thetime, were quite close to that when the German Afrika Corps under Erwin Rommel approached thegates of our country.
There was no need for a conclave of the Elders of Zion in order to turn the Holocaust into acentral instrument in the struggle for the creation of Israel. It was self-evident. TheZionists had argued right from the beginning that in the modern world there can be no existencefor the Jews without a state of their own. The Shoah lent this argument an irresistible force.
It caused the Jews in the State of Israel, which was created in war and had to fight for its life,to crave total security, and so we became a military power. It is impossible to understand boththe good and the bad in Israel without taking into account the impact of the Shoah on ournational and personal consciousness. It was none other than the late Palestinianintellectual, Edward Said, who told this to his compatriots.
The centrality of the Holocaust in Jewish consciousness caused the Jews to insist on itsabsolute exclusiveness. We are shocked and furious when somebody tries to remind us that theNazis exterminated other communities too, such as the Roma, the homosexuals and the mentallyill. We get very angry when somebody comes and compares “our” Holocaust with other genocides:Armenians, Cambodians, Tutsis in Ruanda and others. Really! How can one compare?
The Holocaust was indeed unique in many respects. Nothing compares with the organizedextermination of a whole people by industrial means, with the participation of all the organsof a modern state. It may be that Stalin murdered no fewer, and perhaps even more human beingsthan Hitler, but his victims were drawn from all the peoples and classes of the Soviet Union,and were not subjected to a process of industrialized extermination.
But the concept of the exclusiveness of the Holocaust can lead to despicable perversions.Many among us argue that no moral restraints apply to us, because “after what they did to us”nobody can teach us what is or is not permitted. “After the Shoah” we have the duty to doeverything to save Jewish lives, even by ignoble means. We are allowed to use the memory of theHolocaust as an instrument of our foreign policy, since Israel is the “state of the Holocaustsurvivors”. We are allowed to stifle all criticism of our behavior, since it is self-evidentthat all critics are anti-Semites. We are allowed to blow up every insignificant incident,such as the painting a swastika on a Jewish tombstone, in order to prove that “anti-Semitism ison the rise” in the world and raise the alarm.
I want to argue that now, 60 years after the end of the Holocaust, it is time to grow out of allthis.
The time has come to turn the memory of the Holocaust from an exclusively Jewish property into aworld-wide human possession.
The mourning, the anger and the shame must be turned into a universal message against all formsof genocide.
The struggle against anti-Semitism must become a part of the fight against all kinds ofracism, whether directed against Muslims in Europe or Blacks in America, Kurds in Turkey orPalestinians in Israel, or foreign workers everywhere.
The Jews’ long history as the victims of murderous persecution must not cause us to wrapourselves in a cult of self-pity, but, on the contrary, should encourage us to take the lead inthe world-wide struggle against racism, prejudice and stereotypes that begin withincitement by vile demagogues and can end in genocide.
Such a people would truly be “a light unto the nations.”