Genocide seeks to erase memories
By Terri Fine | Special to the Sentinel
Posted May 9, 2005
Orlando Sentinel , FL
May 8 2005
I recently attended a conference at Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust
victims’ memorial in Jerusalem. The conference brought together
Holocaust educators from around the world to honor the 50th
anniversary of Yad Vashem and to share strategies for teaching about
the uniqueness of the Holocaust and how it helps us understand other
mass genocides such as those in Armenia, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo,
Rwanda and Chile.
One challenge to understanding the Holocaust is that genocide is very
much a part of our present tense. It was not an historical anomaly,
where a combination of political leaders and institutions, mass
support, economic circumstances and a permissive international
environment, made the murder of 6 million Jews, and 5 million others,
including gypsies, homosexuals, members of the political resistance
and the disabled, appear a legitimate government exercise in the name
of a “Final Solution” to racial and ethnic impurity. Two-thirds of
all European Jewry was murdered. Victims included 90 percent of all
Jewish children and 80 percent of Jewish intellectuals and religious
leaders.
Genocide is a 20th century phenomenon. One goal of genocide is to
erase the memory of its victims by eliminating the very physical,
historical and social roots of those peoples. It is one thing to
destroy someone; it is another to erase any memory or record of their
existence. Nazi efforts to erase non-Aryans involved destroying the
communities in which they lived. Entire villages, including homes,
shops, schools, houses of worship, public records and government
offices, were razed to the ground, destroying any signs of their
residents’ daily lives. In 1945, the Nazis worked frantically once
liberation was nearby, destroying their own genocide records,
incinerating dead bodies and removing living victims from the
concentration and death camps by taking them on death marches and
murdering them. Most Holocaust survivors were left without friends
and relatives to cling to for support, homes to return to or
possessions and financial assets to secure. Most survivors were
ailing and terrified upon their liberation; they had no homes to
return to because their own pasts had been destroyed.
Today, at Yad Vashem, remembering what the Nazis sought to eliminate
provides important lessons for more recent genocides. One exhibit is
a cattle car. Cattle cars were used to transport victims from their
homes and villages to concentration and death camps. One hundred
victims were usually herded into a single cattle car and transported,
standing up, with no food, water, fresh air or sanitary facilities,
for several days. Many died during these trips. Those who lived
through such journeys arrived diseased and dehydrated.
At Yad Vashem, the cattle car is placed on a railroad trellis at a
distance from the nearest road. The car itself is unreachable and
untouchable, although the trellis extends to the road. The symbolism
is clear. Genocide makes its victims unreachable and untouchable, as
not only are they themselves victims of murder but so, too, are any
memories of them. Nearly all Holocaust victims lost all or most of
their family members leaving no one to remember them.
There is a traditional Jewish custom of leaving a stone at a
gravesite when one is visiting a cemetery. The stone symbolizes one’s
presence; it is a sign of attendance. In essence, leaving a stone
signifies that the person may be lost but their memory is not. At Yad
Vashem, there are piles of stones placed on that part of the railroad
trellis nearest the road. Persons leaving stones do so because the
unknown victims existed; persons leaving stones believe that victims’
memories should not be erased with their bodies.
The cattle car at Yad Vashem is, in many respects, a poignant symbol
of the causes and consequences of genocide because genocide seeks to
erase the very roots of entire peoples. By dehumanizing its victims,
creating distance between the victimizers and their victims, genocide
makes legitimate the most illegitimate and inhumane of all human
acts. Efforts to confront the effects of genocide, such as those
being undertaken at Yad Vashem and other projects supported by the
United Nations, seek to identify the names and background information
of genocide’s victims.
Such efforts at humanizing genocide’s victims by preventing the
genocide of their memories is the first step toward preventing
genocide itself.
Terri Fine is an associate professor of political science at the
University of Central Florida. She wrote this commentary for the
Orlando Sentinel.