Thoughts on Yom HaShoah - The Jewish Standard

As the sun sets this coming Monday, April 13, Yom Hashoah will begin. It’s often met with solemn programs; on the Upper West Side it’s ushered in with an all-night reading of the names of some of the victims. Many of the victims, but by no means all of them, because six million is many names, and we still don’t even know all the names of all the victims.

Soon after the war ended, when many traumatized survivors managed to come here, often after years in limbo in Displaced Persons camps — and just think about what a dispassionate, agrammatic understatement of a name that is — they weren’t able to talk about what had happened to them. It was too painful for them to do anything other than try to box those memories in their minds, padlock those boxes, encase them in cement, and bury them in the deepest recesses of their brains — even if sometimes, particularly at night, the memories would come out, and the survivors would flail and scream. But most of the time, the survivors were able to lead apparently normal lives. (And of course for all of us, no matter what our backgrounds, the word “normal” does a lot of work.)

A few decades later, many survivors started talking. They’d go to schools, synagogues, and all sorts of other places to describe what had happened to them. Those talks, we’ve read, had different effects on different survivors. Some found them painful, sometimes too painful to do very often. Others found the pain was bearable because the benefits outweighed it. And some found it liberating to be able to disgorge some of the horror, at least at times because they didn’t also have to carry around shame, as if somehow what had happened to them was their fault.

But now there are fewer survivors around. The war was over more than 80 years ago, so even child survivors are elderly now. Anyone who had entered a concentration camp as an adult and survived it not likely still to be alive. Although it also seems to be true — this is anecdotal, to be fair, but still — that some survivors are living to very old ages. It’s as if they survived so much that nothing can stop them now; you’d think that time would accomplish what the Nazis could not, but maybe not.

And the survivors who still are with us seem to be less likely to want to talk. It often seems as if they feel that they’ve done that already, and now they’ve earned the right to privacy. Which God knows they’ve earned.

But — isn’t there always a but? — as time has gone on, Holocaust denial seems to have grown, or maybe it’s just that awareness of the Holocaust has dimmed. The stories are hideous and hard to believe, so why listen to them? And why believe them?

Survivors always knew that this could happen. They’ve been warning us about it for a very long time. But now, as antisemitism rises around the world, as it once again becomes less comfortable for many people to be Jewish in public, as dislike of Israel’s government turns into hatred of Israel, turns into outright antisemitism, we have to pay attention to it again.

And of course we can’t let ourselves drown in it either. If the survivors could overcome fear and go on to live, we can acknowledge the fear but also focus on the hope.

The emotions of Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’Atzmaut — first mourning and then a quick flip to celebration, which we will encounter next week — often seem hard to reconcile. It often reminds me of days at shul when we say Yizkor and then always go to Hallel. How can we remember our dead and then go immediately to praise? It’s hard. Some years it’s impossible. But it’s also wise.

So let’s remember Yom HaShoah and the horrors it marks with reverence and resolve, remember the demand Never Again, and then go forward with both memory and joy. Yes, it’s hard — but we each have a lifetime to figure it out.

—JP

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