Never Again

What does it mean on International Holocaust Memorial Day?

Today is international Holocaust Memorial Day. It’s not the Jewish day of commemoration. That is later on in the year. It is a day for the non-Jewish world to consider the memory of the Holocaust and what it means to them. I’m wondering a lot lately about what the Holocaust means to non-Jews, considering how much it’s been divorced and decontextualized from Jewish storytelling. From where I’m standing the non-Jewish world fetishizes the Holocaust to use it as a metaphor for bad things; things that don’t need a Holocaust comparison in order to be understood as bad.

It makes me sick. Why? The Holocaust is in recent memory for Jews. It is a horror that disproportionately affected Jews. It is a historic atrocity that attempted to end Jewish life on earth, and it took far too many Jewish lives to bare thinking about, but we have to think about it. If we don’t we let those souls perish forever and we let go of the duty we have to ensure ‘never again’.

Growing up Jewish, Holocaust education was instilled in me from a very young age. I was watching documentaries about it as soon as I could open my eyes, and my nightmares as a kid predominantly involved the evil Nazi boogie men waiting for me at the bottom of my bed in the middle of the night. I know that the non-Jewish world does not have the images of the Holocaust imprinted on their brains, does not visit as many Holocaust memorials nor read as many Holocaust testimonials nor have as many interactions with survivors as the Jewish world does. We know about the Holocaust. Do you?

Some Jews have been shamed from talking about it because the non-Jewish world is bored. To that I say: tough. The Holocaust was not an accident, and the series of events that led to it were planned. It was a swift dehumanization of a people in order to justify our mass murder. It began with economic boycotts of Jewish business, with banning of Jews from social and professional life, with ghetto-izing. Any of that sound eerily familiar? Well, I think you know where it ended.

There are many, many stories from different regions of Europe, North Africa and the Middel East where Jews once lived. But one image from a mass killing in the Ukraine always is imprinted on my mind. It is an image in which 33,771 Jews were massacred in the space of two days in September 1941. They filled a ravine called Babi Yar. A ravine that is now just lush green grass. In some of the images of massacres, there are civilians standing on the sidelines. These civilians are not Nazi officers, nor Jewish people. They are non-Jewish civilians. They stood by, and they watched. Bystanders.

Here is a personal document.

Sonja Elpern was my grandfather’s first cousin. In 1944 she was sent a notification to be transported for her ethnic cleansing. Her mother Soro’s maiden name was Berelon (that became “Barlow” when Soro’s brother Gershon - my great grandfather - escaped Lithuania and came to Scotland). Gershon never saw his family again, and we know little of what happened to them in the Holocaust, apart from notifications like this. The letter came during the liquidation of the Kovno ghetto in July ‘44. My grandfather used to write to his cousins but after 1941 the letters stopped. The Germans left paper trails behind because this was a bureaucratic and industrial extermination exercise. It was very efficient. You want to talk about ethnic cleansing? Ask your Jewish friends whether their surnames are their family’s real surnames. Mine is not.

Antisemitism is rife again, and since the events of the past year, the intolerable intellectual terror of antizionism – a campaign to eradicate the Jewish nation of Israel - has snuck its way into the mainstream. Even some our own largest organizations, who were set up to protect the lives of our people post-Holocaust, have become more fixated on currying favor via other political causes than they have sticking to the main agenda: Never again. It’s why I’m here every day, standing between a terrible rise in Jew hatred and whatever could be next. And on today of all days, I’d like to ask you, as someone on the side of all this: where are you standing?