JTA - 05.04.2004

Jews and other Europeans wonder how to recall Shoah — yet move on

By Ruth E. Gruber 

BERLIN, May 3 (JTA) — When it came time to end a recent international conference on anti-Semitism, Bulgaria’s foreign minister chose a gesture that would be charged with emotion and heavily freighted with symbolism and memory. 

In a brief ceremony, Solomon Passy presented the yellow star his grandfather had worn as a Jew in Bulgaria during World War II to German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. 

Passy had chaired the high-level, two-day conference, organized by the 55-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Fischer had been its host. 

“My grandfather used to say that the time will come when we and the Germans will be allies again,” Passy told Fischer. “My grandfather used to say: ‘Then we shall return the yellow star to the Germans.’ 

“I am happy that now I can fulfill the legacy of my grandfather and return the yellow star which he wore,” he continued. “Thank you, Joschka.” 

Both men, born after the Holocaust and brought up on opposing sides of Cold War Europe, blinked back tears. 

That ceremony took place April 29, just two days before the European Union expanded to embrace 10 new members — Malta and Cyprus, plus eight former communist states whose Jewish communities largely were wiped out in the Shoah: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. 

Passy’s gesture, in the capital of the nation whose one-time Nazi leaders decreed the annihilation of European Jewry, demonstrated how much Europe has changed since the end of World War II. 

It also demonstrated how powerfully, 60 years on, the Holocaust and its legacy still frame European identity and self-awareness. 

Today, as direct memory fades and the Shoah recedes into history, one of the challenges facing both Jews and non-Jews is how to draw meaning from the past without getting trapped in empty rituals. 

“Most of us, of course, do not have memories of the Shoah nor, often, sufficient means for apprehending that event,” Eva Hoffman, the Polish-born child of Holocaust survivors, wrote in an intensely personal new book on the legacy of the Shoah, “After Such Knowledge.” 

“What meanings does the Holocaust hold for us today — and how are we going to pass on those meanings to subsequent generations?” she asked.

In effect, the challenge is how to build on history without becoming a prisoner of it. 

“For the inheritors of traumatic historical experience,” Hoffman wrote, “the ability to separate the past from the present — to see the past as the past — is a difficult but necessary achievement. The moment of that separation, of letting go, is a poignant one, for it is akin to the giving up of mourning.”

For Jews, attempting to move on can trigger a range of emotions, including guilt, relief and lingering reluctance. 

“For a lot of people it’s not so much a problem to move forward, but many don’t realize that you can — or should,” said Slavka, a woman in her mid-20s who works for the Auschwitz Jewish Center, a Jewish study, memorial and culture center based near the former Nazi death camp. 

“For young Jews, particularly those from Israel and America, the Holocaust is something that is banged into their head,” she said. “Holocaust education can create defensiveness and hostility in them. I don’t think they realize until it is pointed out to them that it is possible to move forward or see it in a different context.” 

In North America, the proliferation of Holocaust memorials and museums in recent years has prompted some commentators to compare Holocaust remembrance to a quasi-religious experience. 

In this context, said Shai Franklin, director of governmental relations for the U.S. Jewish advocacy organization NCSJ, Holocaust monuments can testify that we have paid our debt to the past, serving almost as shrines. 

But by now, he told JTA, “it’s up to us to be the survivors and to make ourselves into a real, living memorial. Never again should we misread what our duty is, in our own, living, generation” and in the future. 

In Europe, the situation is somewhat different — and so is the challenge. 

Europe is where the Holocaust took place. It’s also where, as the OSCE conference declaration put it, “anti-Semitism, following its most devastating manifestation during the Holocaust, has assumed new forms and expressions which, along with other forms of intolerance, pose a threat to democracy, the values of civilization and, therefore, to overall security.” 

As Passy demonstrated, in much of Europe most Jews have a direct and tangible personal connection to Nazi-era persecution. 

Indeed, the very landscape can bear eloquent witness to the destruction: The modern-looking Jewish community center in Berlin, for example, is built on the site of a grand synagogue that was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. Today’s building incorporates surviving architectural elements from the destroyed synagogue. 

In many countries, thousands of Jewish cemeteries lie abandoned and hundreds of derelict synagogues stand scattered, few of them used as houses of worship. 

Until fairly recently, however, the Holocaust and its commemoration were regarded as a Jewish affair, detached from the general flow of European national history and national memory. 

In Eastern Europe, communist ideology made the extermination of the Jews a footnote to overall suffering in World War II. 

Surviving Jews in many countries kept low profiles after the war. Particularly in communist states, where Jewish life after the Shoah was forcefully suppressed, they often sought to shed or conceal their Jewish identities as a means of self-protection. 

Only in the past 10 to 15 years have these attitudes begun to change, often slowly and at times painfully. 

The revelation several years ago that local villagers and not Nazis had murdered their neighbors in a small town in northeastern Poland sparked a lacerating national debate on Poles’ role and responsibility during the Holocaust. 

Yet, “in Hungarian reality, public discourse on this is practically non-existent,” said Andras Daranyi, director of a first-of-its-kind Holocaust Memorial Center that opened in Budapest in mid-April. 

Daranyi is one of a chorus of voices asserting that the only way to make a meaningful legacy of the Holocaust is to use it as an educational tool to help prevent future persecution — whether against Jews, Gypsies (Roma) or other minorities. 

Indeed, following an international conference on the Holocaust in Stockholm in 2000, many new Holocaust education initiatives were introduced, including the institution of a Holocaust memorial day in various countries. 

“New ways of conveying knowledge of the Holocaust are needed so that succeeding generations of Poles will not have the same attitude to the Holocaust that they do to the Napoleonic Wars,” Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs wrote in an introduction to a book of essays titled “Why Should We Teach about the Holocaust?” The book was published last year in Krakow. 

“Our authors remind us that racism, xenophobia and genocide occur amidst us, and the memory of the Holocaust should serve as a warning against the repetition of crimes against humanity,” she wrote. 

Younger Jews in Europe use the Holocaust experience of their families and European Jews in general as a touchstone for their identities. 

But they often chafe under the burden. They frequently say they want to get out from under the shadow of the Shoah, to escape the mournful imagery and memory-laden stereotype. 

“Will we ever be able to change our image as martyrs and victims, that we ourselves sometimes allow and even cultivate?” asked Zanet Battinou, director of the Jewish Museum in Athens. 

“Unless we manage to understand the message of the Holocaust, to adapt it to today — unless we turn it into a strength — we will never get away from it,” she said.