Last Saturday was the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day (UNIHRD). As a board member of New Zealand’s Holocaust Centre, and the son of a survivor of the camps, I was asked to speak at the Christchurch event.
This year’s UNIHRD was always going to be a sensitive one – the ongoing conflict, destructive and tragic, that started with the October 7th terrorist attacks by Hamas, and continued with Israel’s retaliation, has created a schism in society. The rights and wrongs (and most people will know my view on that) are not relevant to UNIHRD, an event that ensures we keep the memory alive of the millions of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and special needs people who the Nazis killed.
Indeed, seeing the number of individuals who chose not to attend the events this year – from local body politicians to central government politicians, from academics to educators, was a sobering sign of how much current events have changed the landscape. This year’s theme made things even more interesting. With the dwindling number of survivors still alive, it falls upon second, third and fourth-generation survivors to keep the memories alive.
I chose to take a historical perspective and took a step backwards in time to AD 69. The Romans had conquered Israel and while small enclaves of Jews continued to exist in the region throughout time, the vast majority of people were exiled. In the case of my family, it was a slow move into Europe. The Jews generally, and my forbears specifically, flourished in Europe. Limited to certain trades and vocations, they became leaders in business, arts, politics and academia.Â
But there was an undercurrent. Every few years at Easter time the local religious leaders would whip their congregants up into a religious fervour with tales of the killing of Jesus and suggestions the Jews ground Christian children’s bones to make their bread. The congregants would run rampage through the ghettos, murdering and destroying with reckless abandon. But the Jews would regroup and go back to life as usual. They did so passively and meekly and every year at Passover, they would say two things. Firstly, they would remark upon the fact that in every generation, people rise up to destroy us. And secondly, they would articulate the plaintive dream that next year they might be in Jerusalem.Â
Of course, many Jews decided to move away from this religious ghetto dwelling and became more enlightened and assimilated. These Jews often hardly practised Judaism, or even converted to Christianity. They considered themselves good Germans, good Poles, good Hungarians. But even the “good Jews” had their choices significantly curtailed and had to live in predefined ghettos.
And then 1933 happened. And none of the assimilation, the loyalty to the mother country, or the importance of civic life, mattered. Because the Nazis, and their civilian proxies in Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and other countries were very clear, once a Jew, always a Jew. The connection with Judaism was written in blood and unchangeable. The Nazis didn’t care whether the Jews in question were observant Jews, who were quietly living in ghettos keeping to themselves and trying to avoid everyone else, or whether they were the more enlightened Jews of the cities who went around in Western clothes.
It didn’t matter how, or even if, they practised their religion. It didn’t matter how much they were an important part of society. Both groups were murdered without a care. In the case of my own family, my grandfather was murdered in Bergen Belsen. My grandmother and her two daughters, my aunt and my mother, survived the concentration camp, survived the death train, and then went back to Hungary.
So what is this intergenerational Holocaust trauma? In the case of my siblings and I, we were born only 20 or 30 years after our parents survived the Holocaust. In our household, there were, quite literally, the ghosts of those who had perished. Every wall, every mirror, every dinner, and especially every religious ceremony spoke of their loss and their trauma.Â
It came out in the little things, the fact that I have an aversion to wasting food, having heard at least 1000 times since I was a baby how my grandmother squirrelled away food and did extra chores in return for more rations in the concentration camp so that she could make my mother a birthday cake. Or how, after liberation by the American army, my grandmother was very careful to ensure that my mother and my aunt only took small sips of milk. The wise Savta Miriam knew that if they ate a big meal they would risk serious medical injury after months and months of starvation.Â
Of course, I could weave threads together of how the occurrence of the Holocaust should be ample proof that Israel has a right to exist. That the growing antisemitism across the world is justification for “never again” being a hope that requires definitive action to make real. But rather, I will simply reiterate what MP for Banks Peninsula, Vanessa Weenink said in her address: that it is the responsibility of all of us to ensure the memory of the Holocaust is retained, that Holocaust denial and antisemitism are fought against, and that we all do our bit to honour the memory of the millions who were silenced by the Nazi killing machine.
