Why Survivors Would Want to Remember and Want to Forget (at the Same Time)
- People can live without dreams just about as well as they can live without hope—that is, not well at all.
- While dreams keep the past alive, hope summons the future.
- Could you double-down on hope for the future and forget the past? Not really.
- The opposite of the past isn't the past, but the absence of the future. If you don't know where you came from, how in the world are you going to know where you're going?
- And vice versa: how can you know where you're going and not know where you've been?
- Wiesel brings us a memory of a young man who had just lost everything to the Holocaust; his family, friends. He's utterly alone.
- But he doesn't give up. He learns a new language, finds new friends who think like he does—that remembering that kind of evil will stop it from ever happening again.
- He has to think that to survive, really.
- He had just been abandoned by God, while his fellow men built—using the best technology and know-how they had—a living hell with its own rulers, jailers, and captors.
- It was a world where the past didn't matter.
- Any ties to a history before the camps was shattered. Stripped of every connection to the world outside, they were told to forget, to live only in the present moment.
- But just how long is the present? To God it was nothing, and to them God was a slaughterer, choosing who lived and who died.
- Countless people were marched straight into the flames. It seemed like they lived in an entirely different universe, one built on fear and suffering.
- People were reduced to a faceless mob, living for the same meager rations and fearing the same death.
- It was hard to tell if you were even still alive, surrounded by death on all sides.
- But, real despair didn't come yet. It came later. With their past restored, with the camps behind them, thoughts turned from mere survival to a search for understanding. That's when the weight settled in.
- All sorts of learned men—men who loved art, philosophy, science, music—had led hundreds of thousands of them into the slaughter. How do you make sense of that? Could anything explain what turned these men into monsters?
- How do you explain the people who did nothing, even the silence of their supposed liberators, the Allies?
- And the big question: where was God in all this?
- You had to reassess everything because everything you thought was stable had been knocked over.
- Was civilization really moving forward? Was it even capable of moving forward? All of its worst aspects—economic and social tension, xenophobia, racism, religious fanaticism, nationalism—were pretty much summed up by Auschwitz.
- It didn't look like an anomaly as much as it did the rational end-result of the modern age.
- And with all of that puzzled out, the last question stood: why go on, in the kind of world that could do something so vile?
- Forgetting it had happened at all was an option. Us humans are pretty good at getting away from pain. After a sleepless night, we usually lock our darker thoughts away by daybreak and get on with our lives.
- For those who survived that kind of trauma, that wasn't an option. The dead wouldn't go quietly back into their graves.
- Remembering is a noble act, in and of itself. The bible calls for it time and time again, from the very reaches of the distant past.
- New Year's Day, Rosh Hashanah, also goes by Yom Hazikaron: the day of memory.
- On that day, the Jewish people ask God to remember the past year's trials. If he doesn't, all is lost.
- So the loss of memory serves as a sort of divine curse, one that would doom people to repeat the same mistakes endlessly.
- Nothing's more repugnant in the Jewish tradition than war. Is it necessary sometimes? Sure, but never once is it celebrated.
- An old saying goes, "It is the wise men who will bring about peace." And that's probably because those wise dudes have the best memories.
- But forgetting, even wanting to forget, is human. How else can we go on living if we're not able to forget that we'll all die someday? If we couldn't forget that, we couldn't do anything—we'd be permafroze, paralyzed by the fear of our oncoming demises. Only God can, and has to, remember everything.
- So how do you balance your call to remember with your need to forget? It seems that no other generation so urgently needs to know this.
- Survivors of the Holocaust wanted to tell everything that they had suffered, all that they saw, and all that they lost.
- Everyone felt the need to testify, to make sure that the people who could no longer speak were spoken for.
- "Since the so-called civilized world had no use for their lives, then let it be inhabited by their deaths," Elie Wiesel said in words too striking to paraphrase.
- The historian Shimon Dubnov was their model. From the first days in the ghettos to his last day alive, he said time and time again: "Jews, write it all down."
- And write they did—there was an outpouring of written works: histories, novels, poetry, chronicles, and diaries, from the living and the dead alike. The survivors tried to preserve every scrap of testimony they could.
- After the war, they thought it would be enough to tell just one story from one of those days to stop any other atrocity, to stop racism, to stop hatred, to stop the violation of human rights.
- Naive? Sure, but it made a lot of sense.