Deep Thought: How to Remember
Created | Updated Aug 30, 2020
Deep Thought: How to Remember
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Look at the pictures. What do you see? Do you see people who are like you? People who are unlike you? A way of life that's familiar/unfamiliar? A city that has changed a lot in a century?
You know what I see? I see possibilities that didn't happen. Roads not taken. Promises unfulfilled. I see those things because I know something about what happened in the next hundred years. Cities all over eastern Europe were traumatised, torn down, rebuilt, or torn down and not rebuilt at all. There are names you don't hear any more, and places no one goes.
Even the ones that are there are unrecognisable. Vilnius, where the mayor got an Ignobel Prize for driving over a scofflaw parker's Mercedes with a tank, used to be Vilna, the 'Jerusalem of Lithuania'. All those bookshops, cafes, and shuls? Gone in the Holocaust.
Wherever you go on this planet, you step on graves. There's a past, but you don't know it. 'Where we walk to school each day/Indian children used to play' is the start of an actual poem they used to recite in my childhood. The poem is horribly tone-deaf ('Only wigwams on the ground,/And at night bears prowling round…'), but at least it acknowledges the existence of a past.
So does this (and does it better):
Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum
11 August 1912 | Pole Kazimier Gosk was born in Warsaw. An accountant.
In #Auschwitz from 15 August 1940.
No 3129
Evacuated to KL Mauthausen. He survived.
Hour by hour, day by day, the Auschwitz Memorial Museum tweets out the names and histories of those who found themselves in the death camp. Some survived, but most didn't. They were old, young, babies and grandparents, Roma, Jews, Poles, gay men from Germany, politicians the Nazis didn't like… Stay with that account and you'll find every profession under the sun: accountants and shoemakers, rabbis and musicians, bricklayers and doctors. They'll never get through all of them – there were millions – but every hour, every day, we see faces, we read names and the few lines of their histories, and we try to remember.
The museum gets the most posts, retweets, and comments from the pictures of babies and toddlers. 'Sweet baby!' people say. 'How could they do that?' What stops me dead, though, are the young adults whose dreams of a career, marriage, and family have been taken away, or those in mid-life, or even old age, who find themselves in this horrible place. The stacks of suitcases. The piles of shoes. The lives destroyed, the legacies disrupted. Who's going to pay for that, I scream inside.
We are, friends. There's something we can do. We can't go back and save them – not before we invented time travel – but we can honour their memories with more than a sigh and a headshake. In fact, we must do this, or we're letting the killers get away scot free.
To honour the memories of those who died, we have to retrieve something they left behind, and pass it on. It could be a message. Or a song, an idea, a poem, a painting, a photograph…a shoe, a carving, a piece of furniture… It won't make up for the worlds they left unfinished. But it will make sure they're included in the world we claim to owe to their 'sacrifice'.
This morning, I read about the 124th anniversary of the birth of Milena Jesenská. She was a Czech writer, translator, and friend of Franz Kafka's. She died in Ravensbrück in 1944. She wasn't Jewish, though her husband was. She's celebrated as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem. How can we remember her? By reading her works, if you know Czech. Or readings Kafka's letters to her. Or even listening to this BBC radio play by Murray Gold, called 'Kafka: The Musical', in which she is a character.
Czech writers may not be your forte. But history is littered with the unfinished stories of those who were left behind by the majority: not only writers, poets, and musicians, but pioneers of all kinds. Farmers and philosophers, kindergarten teachers, gardeners. When we stumble across their traces, it's up to us to find out more. Tell people about them – the Edited Guide, anyone? Learn something, and use it today. Rescue it, and put it back into the stream. Down the river, they may appreciate it.
Better than tweeting your appreciation of the latest trendy hits.
