It is fine with anniversaries. But also a dangerous one. For they tend to get us to see the story in the wrong way; as something with a beginning, a middle and an end. So is it also with the Holocaust, whose remembrance day on 27 January to coincide with the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where over a million people were murdered.
In the middle of January 1945 was forced all who could still stand on your legs for a death march towards Germany. Many were shot along the way, or fallen. When the allied troops reached the camp on January 27, there were only 7000 prisoners.
When Bergen–Belsen was liberated was heard no cheers. It was all quiet.
told, as well as how life in the camps was. But then? The holocaust was not over with the liberation. The remain in faded pale green carvings in aging skin, in shadows and echoes decades through. If this we’re talking less: How was life for the survivors?
the Psychologist Edith Eger, who himself ended up in Auschwitz, said in interviews that she could not feel the joy of liberation. She lay with a broken back on a pile of dead bodies when the allies arrived, she was starved and dying, and could no longer distinguish reality from hallucination. Long as she felt then, shame that she had survived, when so many others died.
the Same thing, it was for Freddie Knoller, who tells us that when Bergen–Belsen was liberated was heard no cheers. It was all quiet.
The survivors often had few relatives left in life, no money, strangers had moved into their old home. The anti-semitic feeling was still strong, not least in Germany and Poland. Therapy barely existed at the time, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder did not come about until 1980.
Many chose to leave everything behind, and move to a new place, a new country, try to forget as best we could. Painstakingly, they built new lives.
who can testify, and we must therefore continue in their place. I have always thought so. As to the act itself that we remember is a guarantee that this atrocity will never ever happen again.
Yet there are impulses where still, it is clear, vis-à-vis the jews, as well as other ethnic groups. Perhaps it is the permission we so often dismiss as cruel and inhuman, in fact, irreparably human?
in this case, the stubborn spark of life that drove the survivors to continue on. As Edith Eger’s mother said to her on the train to Auschwitz, in an evil premonition: ”remember that no one can take from you what you have within you.” In every human being there is strength, hope, the ability to love despite everything. If this may we also tell.
