Reprinted with permission from a lecture given at the annual Rochester Yom Hashoah Commemoration April 20, 2009. Dr. Dobkowski is Professor of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the child of Holocaust Survivors. He has authored many books including The Nuclear Predicament: Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century; The Coming Age of Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the 21st Century; Towards the Holocaust: The Social and Economic Collapse of the Weimar R
epublic; Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death.
Dr. Dobkowski is a nationally recognized expert in the areas of Holocaust Studies, American Anti-Semitism, the American Jewish experience, the History of Judaism, and the history of Zionism and Modern Israel.
He is also a member of the Holocaust Study Group and a lecturer for the Two-Thousand-Year Road to the Holocaust.
“I want to write about memory, about hope and about responsibility. Remember—Gedenk (Yiddish). Remember that you were a slave in Egypt. Remember to sanctify the Sabbath… Remember the Amalekites who wanted to annihilate you…Remember that you were once a stranger in a strange land –We just concluded Pesach, Passover, a holiday that is all about memory and about recreating that memory. No other Biblical commandment is as persistent. Jews live and grow under the signs of memory. To be Jewish is to remember—to claim our right to memory as well as our duty to keep it alive. For memory is a blessing: It creates bonds rather than destroying them. And it also creates responsibility. Primo Levi once said that the victims of the Nazis, exterminated in the camps, did not vanish forever in the smoke of the ovens. They have a grave, but it is a fragile one: our memory.
To remember is to affirm faith in humanity, to affirm faith in history and to affirm a fundamental optimism about the future. Without memory there can be no future in any meaningful sense. Memory, therefore, is really a religious concept, a theological one. The aim of memory is to restore dignity to justice, to allow us to live in more than one world, to have the possibility to be tolerant of difference. Without memory, mankind’s image of itself would be impoverished. I often wonder about the theological implications of Auschwitz, but here I must emphasize that Auschwitz was conceived, planned, constructed, managed and justified by people. What human beings did there to other human beings will affect future generations. After Auschwitz, hope itself is filled with anguish. But—after Auschwitz, hope is necessary. Where can it be found? Ironically, in remembrance alone. We remember Auschwitz and all that it symbolizes because we believe that, in spite of the past and its horrors, the world is worthy of salvation, and salvation like redemption, can be found only in memory.
Albert Camus said: Where there is no hope we must invent it. What is life without hope; without future? Holocaust survivor Jean Améry said, “No one can become what he cannot find in his memory.” So memory is really about future and we see that powerfully confirmed in the lives the survivors have built.
Somehow an entire generation of Jews has risen from the ashes determined to build on and with ashes; to build new homes for themselves and for the homeless and other exiled wanderers. That, in fact, is the hope contained within the Holocaust--that is its lasting legacy.
The greatest instance of hope is, of course, the historic conjunction of the founding of the State of Israel and the Holocaust. You simply cannot separate the two. I am not asserting or even implying that Israel, now so terribly challenged, is, in some measure a compensation for the anguish of the Holocaust. I would never make the metaphysical connection. Israel did not emerge out of the ashes of six million innocent victims. Rather the connection between the two central events of modern Jewish experience is that it demonstrates a creative genius that was able to defy death, an uncanny Jewish ability to discover hope and to build and to survive because of persecution and despite of it.
There are many other examples of such great Jewish creativity and dignity. Certainly the instances of resistance must never be forgotten. Nor must we overlook the many cases of incredible courage displayed by Jews in the way they went to their deaths. Commitment to life and to survival was expressed in a thousand different ways: women continued to have children in the ghettos; the D.P. camps after the war had one of the highest birthrates in the world. This is a tribute to the stubbornness and sense of purpose of our people and are great acts of affirmation.
The survivors took heed of an ancient biblical voice: “I call heaven and earth to witness to you this day, “Moses," in the name of God says, “that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curses; therefore choose life, that you and your descendents may live.” Moses spoke before Kristallnacht, and Treblinka, Warsaw and Auschwitz. He still speaks today. Choose life. It sounds simple, but the simplicity is a cloud that hides the agonizing content of living after the Shoah. Choose life, choose hope, choose action and remember the power of laughter. That is what the survivors have done. They are, when all is said, a surprisingly successful group. Their family lives are stable and they have contributed much to the Jewish community, in ways far disproportionate to their number. In an age when Jewish identity is being attenuated, their identity as Jews remains strong.
And then there is their moral voice. We would not have Yom Hashoah, Yad Vashem, The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Museum of Jewish Heritage, The Museum of Tolerance, our own CHAI, the Holocaust Study Group and hundreds of other memorials and centers were it not for survivors and their children. The Holocaust has become part of American culture. Every time a survivor speaks to classes of students or participates in a community forum he or she contributes to the awareness, the reality and the meaning of the Shoah. Every such encounter, every life touched, represents a contribution by the survivors toward ensuring that the Holocaust will not be forgotten.
The survivor comes to us and speaks to us with muted voices of the six million resonating in her voice. She tries to warn us of the collapse of meaning and the mutilation of the human and divine image taking place all around us, both then and now. Many, however, find it difficult to listen to their voices. Those who listen often cannot understand. For, unlike the survivor, we have not seen the inside of our own grave or the visage of the corpse staring back at us from a mirror.
And yet, when we do have the courage to listen to those voices, there is something in the soul of each of us, something in our very flesh and blood, that cries out in the midst of their outcry. Suddenly we realize that the tales of terror we receive are not only about them—they are about us. In graphic and literal ways we are connected to this tragedy that we cannot understand. The ashes that ascended on high have rained down to cover the face of the earth.
When a single cloud of radiation rose from Chernobyl in 1986, within days radiation levels in Montana were up. The amount of air pollution for a given year can be measured by taking a plug of ice and snow from Antarctica. How deeply, then, are we bound to the event called the Holocaust, when dozens of clouds of ashes bellowed into the air for a thousand days, twenty-four hours each day? Those ashes helped nourish the bread we harvest from the earth and place in our mouths. They stir in our bodies and they disturb our souls in a transformation of matter into spirit. For it is their voices—the voices of the ones who collided with the thing itself—that reverberate in the voices of the survivors.
Therefore, even if we cannot understand the survivors’ accounts of the Shoah, their tales cut us to the quick. For the stories they tell are part of our own stories; deciding something about this matter, we decide something about ourselves, about why we live and die, what we hold dear, and where we go from here. When the survivors bear witness to what few eyes have seen, they entrust us with a message that we must struggle to deliver and a testimony that we must attempt to bear. Thus transformed into messengers and witness, we are transformed into teachers. But, similar to the survivors who must deliver a message that cannot be delivered. We are faced with teaching something that cannot be taught. This matter that comes to us from the anti-world cannot easily be accommodated by the categories of the world.
Despite the fact that we currently possess a mass of information about the Holocaust, there remains an opaqueness, a mystery, at the heart of the event. The Holocaust does not lend itself to easy explanation. It does not inform in the conventional sense. The Holocaust perplexes and exhausts; it frightens and defies. It leaves us with many more questions than answers. How could Europe’s most cultured people have devised the most efficient mass-murder operation in history? How could “ordinary” people have willingly participated in genocide? Why did the world at large remain indifferent to the plight of the victims? Why was it so difficult, “for ‘good’ people to move from knowledge of what the Nazis were doing, to comprehension of the significance of Nazi activities, and then to action aimed at thwarting Nazi success”?
In a quest for an elusive understanding it certainly helps to go back to those places that were once sites of great creativity and life but were transformed into a kingdom of night. I had the privilege last May of traveling with forty remarkable students from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Nazareth College and their brilliant mentors Lynne Bouche, Jennie Schaff, BK, Karen Dobkowski, and three powerful survivor witnesses and educator-guides. I know that some of you are in the room. Please stand. Just a few reflections on that experience. I am drawn to Poland where my family is from.
Today there are about 25,000 Jews in Poland. Before the war there were 3.2 million. The 500,000 Jews of pre-war Warsaw are no longer in Warsaw, they are in Treblinka, two hours away. The Jews of Warsaw are beneath the stones of Treblinka; they are the stones of Triblinka. There they stand at attention, silently witnessing, silently accusing. The thousands of stones that cover the grounds of Treblinka illustrate the essential equality of the place. All were worthy and equal in the face of death, all of them, large and small, are impregnated with the same silence. From afar they can easily be mistaken for Jews at prayer.
Auschwitz is a kind of museum. Clean, well-kept, a real museum. There are photographs, maps, arrows on the walls to direct us, guides. The guide explains: “This way to the gas chamber, ladies and gentlemen.” The gate surges open. “Here are the watchtowers, the S.S. barracks, and the offices. This way to the bunker, a torture chamber within a torture chamber, we are led from one block to another.
We walked through the gates of Auschwitz with its inscription that mocks all meaning “Arbeit Macht Frei,” work makes you free; In that nightmare of a place, work makes you dead.
We stood in the halls and rooms that still hold the possessions of the victims—heaps of suitcases, piles of toothbrushes and combs, hundreds of prosthetic limbs, mounds of hair, piles of cooking utensils, dolls and toys, and hundreds of thousands of shoes, worn, and weathered—and realized that for the Nazis human lives were less valuable than objects. Millions of objects saved, millions of lives taken.
To learn more—to feel more—we walk to Birkenau—the killing camp.
What hasn’t been said about this place? Philosophers and historians, psychologists and novelists, theologians and poets, explorers of the human soul and the unconscious have all found in this universe of ashes a subject to be investigated, and rightly so: no subject is more vital to our generation. We listened to our survivors share their painful stories. Terrified children, stubborn Gypsies, the resigned old people and the sick, over a million Jewish people brought from the far corners of enlightened Europe perished here. There was nothing to say, there are no words. A prayer? Which one? There is no prayer really for such places. Some of us lit candles for the victims, for the loved ones of our survivors who perished there. Some of us said Kaddish for our beloved Israeli guide-educator Chaim Fuch’s brother.
I found myself saying Kaddish for a brother he never knew.
From somewhere behind me came the young voices repeating the words after me, blessing and glorifying the Master of the Universe. They had tears in their eyes. “For whom are you saying Kaddish?” I asked. Their eyes looked beyond the pits to the collapsed crematoria. “It is for them.”
We were struck by the piercing silences of those places. Yet, those places teach and instruct. They call out to us—they demand that we witness and they demand that we accept our responsibility of living in a post-Shoah world. What is our responsibility?
We have a responsibility to commit ourselves to rid the world of the threat of genocide. Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity because it negates the very value of human life itself. Let me be absolutely clear: we simply do not have to put up with this anymore.
This “we” is an inclusive group; everyone with a will and a way is welcome. But its purpose must go far beyond declaratory well wishing. It is not a bad thing but a grossly insufficient thing to join in choruses of “never again.” No, we must act to stop the killers.
And by “we” in the last analysis, I mean the United States. The Shoah should have taught us what happens when we act too little too late to stop the killings. “Un di velt hot geshvigen”—and the world was silent. We have the means at our disposal to stop what we and all right-thinking people know is wrong. It comes down to the choices of whether to act or not. That was true 70 years ago and it is certainly true today.
If we are unable to muster the political will to halt genocide, the long-term consequences are truly chilling to contemplate. This is of course true with regard to future victims. But it is also true for us. Future generations more committed to the principles we espouse but fail to act on may look back with disdain on our failure like we now look back at the generation of bystanders and collaborators during the Holocaust who did not do enough to stop the killing. Or, more horrifying still future generations may conclude that all moral reasoning in political matters is sentimental and that the only principle that matters in politics is that the strong take care of themselves and the weak are on their own. That, in fact, is the thinking that the Nazis counted on.
In 1948, with the dimensions of the Holocaust still unfolding, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring genocide a crime under international law. Due to the tireless work of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who escaped Europe and came to the United States in 1941, the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis now had a name and a definition. He coined the term genocide thereby making an important contribution to the history of ideas. He also worked frantically to get the UN diplomats to recognize that a unique crime was being perpetrated against his people. It was too late to save his family but he laid the foundation for genocide prevention in the future. This effort 60 years ago to “internationalize” the crime of genocide might have been the UN’s finest hour. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the crime of Genocide is not self-executing in that it does not compel its signatories to take any particular action if the treaty is violated. But it does provide a legal and moral framework for preventive action.
Several year ago in 2005 the UN embraced the doctrine of “responsibility to protect”, known colloquially as R2P. Hopefully we will be hearing more about this initiative in the future. It states that a nation has the responsibility to protect those living in its territory from atrocities. If a state is unwilling or unable to fulfill this requirement the protection falls to the international community. With sovereignty comes responsibility. If “we” are serious, we have to be willing to take upon ourselves the burden of providing the leadership, the arms, the resources and even the troops, if necessary, because the would-be-genociders are out there now thinking about their future victims and whether they can get away with it and they are getting away with it in Darfur.
And we also have a responsibility to confront the growing dangers facing the Jewish people today—the thickening and darkening clouds of a resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe, the Middle East, South America, even the United States, that does not discriminate against Jews as individuals on account of their religion. Instead, it is centered on Israel, and the denial of the Jewish people the right of self determination. The new anti-Semitism, for the first time since the Shoah, presents an existential threat to the Jewish people—particularly now with the threats posed by Iran, Hezbollah and even Hamas.
The key tactic is a kind of unspeakable Holocaust inversion with the Israelis being demonized as Nazis and the Palestinians being portrayed as the new Jews. The Jews, having suffered the most from genocide, stand accused of genocide. The language is hateful and extremely hurtful. The idea is that the Jews, the Israelis, as the new Nazis, have proven themselves unworthy of their tragic history. The Jews are facing a kind of triple death—First there was the attempt to annihilate us, then our bodies were literally turned to ashes and smoke, and now there is an attempt to pervert and steal our history from us. Many Holocaust survivors who emerged from the ghettos, camps, from hiding and from the forests, like many parents, often had two refrains: no one will believe us, and they will blame us for Auschwitz. Sadly there is a danger that they may have been right.
That is why Holocaust education and awareness, and commemorations of Yom Hashoah are even more important today than ever before. And that is where hope comes in, the hope of the young people, the students who have listened by the thousand to the stories and the words of our survivors, to the young people who have taken the Zikaron trip of Remembrance to the USHMM, to the students who have gone on the Journey for Identity with their Israeli colleagues and to the students from Nazareth College and Hobart and William Smith Colleges who went on the March of Remembrance and Hope leadership trip and their mentors. I want to commend all the students who have found the courage, dedication and commitment to listen to the stories of the survivors, to become the bearers of their memories, to become the witnesses for the witnesses. They have been energized and inspired by those experiences and have already made a difference on their campuses and in their communities. They have reached out to others in generosity and empathy, and have become activists for causes of social justice and genocide prevention. They are laying the seeds for future students, becoming role models for their peers and for us. They understand, as we must, that as witnesses the debt of responsibility must be passed on. We cannot write the future. Only the young people can do that. But we can teach them to create a world of respect for difference that may come tomorrow if they work hard for it today.
If I could humbly suggest what our responsibility to the Shoah should be…, what the deafening silences of those places demand of us, I would say bring children into the world, infuse the world with laughter, song and joy, build schools, honor books, make and cherish friends, make and sustain communities, have faith in God who had faith in mankind despite his genocidal tendencies and make sure that God’s voice is heard wherever evil threatens. Spend some moments from time to time, reflecting and thinking about those who were killed—remember them, please try to remember them! Pursue justice, defend the defenseless, work to end genocide once and for all, champion the responsibility to protect, R2P, have the courage to be different and take care of those who are different, the Other in our midst. Recognize the image of God in others, especially in the faces of those unlike our own, and defeat hate with respect and love.”