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Take a Little Piece of My Heart
April 6, 2008
Our society has arbitrarily decided that a crime ends at the moment that it ends. This is nothing but a decision of convenience. When someone kills a person, the crime ends at that very moment. Then, the courts convene to judge and punish the perpetrator and all go home satisfied: judge, jury, reporters — all, but the victim and those that loved him. The victim is deprived forever and ever of experiencing life. Those who are left behind, who loved the victim, not only miss him, but are deprived forever of sharing with their loved one anything at all. “The crime ended and the case is closed” appears somewhat insensitive under this particular light. And so it is with the Holocaust. The perpetrators may be long gone, the countries involved might have signed peace treaties, but the ground where so many victims were buried or burned lost its chemical similarity with the adjacent, virginal ground. The world has been deprived for eternity any and all events and creations that the murdered would have produced otherwise. Not one, but an infinite number of generations will not happen, ever. And those that survived, in proximity or distanced from the victims, will never be the same.
For most people, and that includes historians as well, the Holocaust ended with the termination of World War II. This has been accepted as dogma, even Holocaust institutions believe so. It is easy to see why one would agree with this contention. After all, all of the official killings of Jews directed by the German government stopped with the liberation of the camps and the termination of the Third Reich regime.
However, it is my contention that the Holocaust did not end with the termination of WWII. In fact, I am proposing that the Holocaust continues to this very day. It would be an error to think that the Holocaust can be defined by the number of murders that took place. The mass murder of Jews was only a part of the Holocaust. There is another component of it that did not involve killing: I am talking about suffering, about the altering on a permanent basis the mentality of those that were not killed, of affecting the thought process and behavior of the living.
In this vein, I am inclined to accept that there are very few Jews that have not been affected by the Holocaust perpetrated during the period of 1933-1945. What can we say of those that survived but were left totally stripped of the belongings they had prior to 1933? And what of those whose education was cut prematurely by the policies of that horrible period. What can we say of those who survived after watching their families taken to the slaughter? Even if these Jews did not spend a day in a concentration camp, their lives were altered forever. Similarly, there are millions of Jews that grew up under the gloom of the Holocaust, whose outlook on life was affected by the darkened skies that persisted even after the ovens and the burning trenches filled with the carrion of hundreds of thousands of Jews were finally extinguished.
I can say without fear of being wrong, even under the protest of some purists that the Holocaust continues. It continues inside those that survived it, in their solitude and the utmost despair of having lost their childhood. It continues in the children of survivors that were denied a fully open relationship with their parents, separated by an invisible wall of terrible memories. It continues in a single tear shed when someone, confronted for a moment with a photograph or a story about a person that suffered or perished at the hands of the Nazis and their accomplices, experiences even – (if only for an instant)- pain. The Shoah survives even if only one artist allows himself or herself to become a vessel and channels this emotional history into his or her work. And, it survives if there are museums that allow people to view either the relics of that time or the artistic creations inspired by those horrible days. We must remember……
Greta Brewer
Vice President of Education,
NEXT GENERATIONS
NEXT GENERATIONS is under the auspices of LEAH, League for Educational Awareness of the Holocaust.
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