|
It often appears to me that there can be no Remembrance of the
Jews within
the Holocaust, or the very struggle for Jewish existence without
the
Holocaust, unless reference is paid to all those other nationals
murdered by
the Reich or by intolerances elsewhere. As an author on the Holocaust
I am
heavily involved, each year, with the Holocaust Memorial Day and
find this
anomaly strange.
Even the chosen slaughter of 33,771 Jews of Kiev at Babi-Yar must
have its
gentile element. Like Elie Wiesel has said,
"not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims."
I think this sums it up adequately, without the need to dilute
the very
efforts the Nazi's entered into to select Jews above all others.
There must
be a case for simply remembering the Jews of the Holocaust?
Can we allow the Jews their grief, without referencing our own,
especially
when that Jewish grief in history has been so marked, and the reference
point given as the Holocaust? Yet we insist that we suffered too?
This
appears as a preponderance toward age old anti-Semitism, which has
been the
commisssioning evil of civilisations chequered past.
Maybe in the dilution of the reference to the Jewish catastrophe
we seek to
disguise 'christian' participation? Our inhumanity cannot be disguised
so
easily! It almost appears as an attempt to deny the Jewish 'exclusivity'
within the Holocaust, while acknowledging that Jews as well as others
were
indeed murdered.
But surely the case for remembering is that anti-Semitism holds
the key to
all that we seek to learn from the Holocaust, and it is the hatred
of the
Jewish Semite People that we wish to learn from in order to prevent
other
atrocity's from happening. Already that is too late, but is that
because we
have not chosen to reflect totally upon what was a Jewish Catastrophe
perpetrated by a wholly 'christian' community?
Maybe the lesson to be taught will emerge from the 'Shoah' of the
Jewish
People, unless that proves too exclusive for the 'christian' community
to
bear?
Patrick Dempsey
(c) 2005 Patrick Dempsey |
