There has for a while now been building a steady chorus of protest over commemorating the Holocaust. The voices are both Jewish and Non-Jewish. Some of them come from the left which indicts the Holocaust for being too limited to Jews to be worth remembering and as a pretext for oppressing the poor paleo-terrorist people. Some come from the right which claims the whole thing is anti-Christian and just prevents reconciliation between the Jews and everyone else.
Too much, the voices cry. Too much remembrance. Too much dedicated to remembering it. Who needs it anyway.
David Klinghoffer sums up this view quite nicely when he writes, "Our preoccupation with the ultimate symbol of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, has become notorious. There is no end in sight to the Holocaust history books, Holocaust novels, Holocaust television shows, Holocaust magazine and newspaper articles, chairs in Holocaust studies at universities, Holocaust museums, Holocaust poems, Holocaust paintings, Holocaust sculptures..."
Remembering the Holocaust is then a preoccupation. Some annoying obsession we can't seem to let go of. These same voices do not seem to think that the Civil War is a notorious preoccupation though it happened nearly a century and a half ago, though there are Civil War memorials, Civil War television shows, Civil War movies, Civil War books, Civil War newspaper articles, Civil War paintings, Civil War studies, Civil War poems.
Folks like Klinghoffer do not pen articles asking Americans to give up their preoccupation with the Civil War, to cry a halt, enough is enough. They feel no irritation at it in the least. For that matter Klinghoffer is not bothered by WW2 memorials, television shows, movies, books, magazine articles, studies and poems. It's perfectly okay to be 'preoccupied' with WW2, just not with the Jewish end of it. The moment studying WW2 slips into studying what happened to the Jews in WW2, it instantly becomes to him an example of neurotic behavior. An obsession with anti-Semitism. An unhealthy fixation on the murder of six million Jews.
When the Jews of Europe first went out of the world, the Holocaust was not a safe subject for discussion, nor was had happened to them. The allies who issued statements condemning German atrocities in leaflets dropped over Germany, did not mention the Jews. Neither did Roosevelt in his radio addresses. Neither did the Pope. The Jews who were liberated from the concentration camps (now the subject of many glowing documentaries) were not set free, for the most part they were considered DP's, Displaced Persons, and were put right back into camps with barbed wire, guarded by armed German guards. There was little if any recognition that anything particular had happened to them.
The Jews were considered citizens of their countries of origin meant to be returned there, never mind the fact that the citizens of most of those countries had willingly played a part in butchering them and that many of those countries were now under Stalinist rule. Truman fumed over a handful of Jewish refugees admitted to the United States. Eisenhower fumed over the Jews in the DP camps who refused to do what they were told. The State Department in partnership with the British fumed that despite their best hopes, some Jews had survived the Holocaust after all and were headed on illegal boats to British ruled Israel.
After the Holocaust there was no flood of memoirs. There was little in the way of a uniquely Jewish historical understanding of what had gone on. The academic, political and press consensus was that the Nazis had been mean people who had killed a lot of people, for no particular reason, except that they were against democracy. An echo of that kind of silly stupid rhetoric can still be heard in Bush's speeches when he presumes that Democracy equates with morality and a lack of it with amorality. That is belied by the fact that in WW2 fascist regimes and Fascist nations like Mussolini, Tojo and Franco did more to save Jews than democratic Switzerland or democratic France did, when they handed over Jews to the Nazis to be shot.
Most of the Nazis who had been convicted of war crimes were prematurely released under pressure frin the German government. Former Nazis had no trouble finding plenty of countries to take them in from Argentina to Ireland to America, which brought in many of them to 'fight Communism.' Post-WW2 discussions of atrocities were far more likely to focus on Hiroshima and Dresden than on Auschwitz and Dachau.
In the Senate, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who before hijacking and wrecking a legitimate investigation into Communist infiltration of America, had stood on the Senate floor thundering demands that the SS perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre of 84 US troops be freed because their confessions had been obtained under duress (shades of Gitmo). The SS men who had murdered American soldiers were eventually all released in a matter of years. As were most of those who had been responsible for the Holocaust. On the Holocaust itself there was a shameful silence.
The USSR denied any Holocaust of Jews had taken place. Even decades later when it granted that it had, it limited the number to 3 million, those Jews who had been living in Soviet territories. The rest didn't matter. Many of those refugees had made it out of German territory into the USSR had been shot as German spies. Behind the scenes Stalin was hatching a plan for a Soviet Holocaust of the Jews. One that would permit the USSR to carry off a Holocaust while still keep Communists and socialist around the world loyal to the Soviet Union, using plausible deniability. Up until this point Communism had managed to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews, imprison many more and suppress Jewish culture and religion, while still being claimed by liberal Jews and non-Jews around the world, from Time Magazine to H.G. Wells to the Archbishop of Canterbury. There was no reason, Stalin thought, he couldn't wipe out all the Jews and still remain the world's beloved, Uncle Joe.
The Allies were meanwhile too busy embracing our newfound German allies against Communism to want to hear anything about their crimes. The newly hatched Israeli government was all too willing to sweep the whole thing under the rug in order to build ties with Germany. When future Prime Minister Begin led a march of Holocaust survivors in protest to the Knesset against the German policies of the Labor Socialist government, they were tear gassed by the police. I could tell far worse stories but I will not. No one wanted to hear from those had survived the Holocaust.
Today they are dying and we are hearing from them. We are remembering and listening, for what little good it does and still there are still many voices raised in protest that would prefer we didn't. Voices from the right and the left, voices of conservative and liberal Jews. Rabbi Daniel Lapin is outraged that the Holocaust Museum linked Christian anti-Semitism to the Holocaust, as if Germany and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century had been populated entirely by Hindus. David Klinghoffer of course finds all the Holocaust talk to be a bit too much.
But we remember. Many thousands of years later we pray at the gravesite of Rachel our mother. Thousands of years later we weep at the remnant wall of the temple. We stand at Masada and each ten day interval between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur we recite piyutim remembering those murdered in the Crusades. We have not forgotten and we will not forget. To the 'Jewish' Klinghoffers of the right and the left, sneering at us, we can only reply to them as we do at the Seder, that is it a matter of Lachem Ve'Lo Lo. It is to us that this matter not to you. It is to us who are a part of it, who feel it in our hearts and our souls. You have no part of it or a part in us. As Naomi said to Orpah, go home. Our home is with the Jewish people, the living and the dead. Yours is elsewhere. Go and find it wherever it may be.
From NY to Jerusalem, Daniel Greenfield Covers the Stories Behind the News
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