Yom Hazikaron leshoah ulegvurah (Remembrance day for the holocaust and its heroes) is commemorated on a different day in Israel to the rest of the world. While the rest of the world commemorates the Allies’ arrival in Auschwitz for its liberation, Israel remembers the day that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began (which began the night before Passover... and so is commemorated a couple of weeks later).
Over the years I’ve read books, seen films, been to the world’s best museums in Jerusalem and Washington, where I’ve seen the mountains of clothes, shoes, glasses, even false teeth, extracted by the Nazis from their victims to maximise the profit and efficiency of the extermination camps. And yet, in honesty, I’ve always felt totally detached from the Shoah. Perhaps that is a coping mechanism, but more likely because I’m unable to grasp the utter horror of reality, the fact that we as a people, and me as a person, were so close to the edge. It helps that I don’t know of any immediate relatives who were still in Europe when Hitler and Eichmann started their final solution. Truthfully, I’d rarely notice Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK.
Two days ago, I experienced my second memorial day here in Israel. People are more subdued, the buses quieter, the radio plays solemn music. At 10am, a siren blares across the entire nation for two minutes, while people stop their cars in the middle of the motorway to get out and stand in respect. I remember my minute of silence each year in the UK for those fallen in the two world wars; stopping in a corridor in a hospital while people walk past eating, talking, looking at the odd doctor who is just standing there.
Thank G-d I’ve never been in the wrong part of Israel at the wrong time, and so have never heard an air raid siren (although they still happen every day in the Southern cities near Gaza), and I never heard the siren warning of an incoming scud missile during the Gulf War. As long as the world wakes up from its slumber, perhaps I’ll never hear the siren of a missile coming from Iran, either. So, I don’t know whether the siren they sounded two days ago sounds like the one I never want to hear. But either way, there’s an incredible link between the two. As 6 million Jews in Israel stop to remember the 6 million who were slaughtered, suddenly the reality of the world’s hatred becomes real. The noble attempts of Jewish organisations to make the Shoah tangible – by giving each university student the name of a real person who lived sixty years ago, for example – becomes so irrelevant when you watch your teachers, the people who came here or were born here 50 years ago and now teach the next generation to talk in our ancient tongue, light a candle, and weep as they proclaim, “I am lighting this candle in honour of my mother, my father, my uncle, my auntie, my grandfathers and grandmothers, and their sisters and brothers, who died at the hands of the Nazis”. Our teachers, full of zeal and enthusiasm, so proud of our little country, so bright about the future, all of a sudden reduced to those infants who were taken from the camps by soldiers, or who escaped Europe on the kindertransport. Suddenly Israel’s mistrust of the outside world is legitimate, because it really wasn’t long ago that even the most friendly of countries left the Jews for dead because it wasn’t a priority during their war plans. The US and UK both made the decision that they couldn’t afford one single raid (one single bomb) to destroy the gas chambers at Auschwitz and save quite literally millions of lives. It’s significantly less time since the UN obeyed Egypt when she told them to leave the border with Israel, so Egyptian forces could invade. So when the rest of world points at Israel, working hard to fortify herself to the hilt with fences, radars, patrols, check points and soldiers, and asks for a proportionate response, suddenly the cynicism of Israel’s senior population makes sense. Why should they trust anyone?
I heard a very interesting observation today, from the Israeli author David Grossman. “The rest of the world refers to the Shoah as what happened ‘back then’. Jews refer to what happened ‘over there’. To us, it’s living memory. To many, it’s first hand living memory. And it’s not over”.
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