What I learned from Auschwitz

[andrewducker]

Great essay here on the lessons that can be learned.

It is not enough merely to remember the past; one must remember the truth, analyze it, derive rules from it and desire to act. But this is not what we usually do. Most of our remembering, in fact, does the opposite: it is a preparatory step for the final ejection of the truth from public consciousness. This style of remembering is similar to the process by which an oyster creates a pearl by coating an impurity. The movie Schindler's List is an example of this kind of remembering; it sends you from the theater hopeful and relieved, feeling that the Holocaust has been handled: a hero has arisen to handle the Holocaust. In so doing, it tells the wrong story. The main themes of the Holocaust were not rescue or hope but despair and murder. Of all the books I have read on Auschwitz, none mention Oskar Schindler or relate the episode shown in the movie of his rescue of the "Schindlerjuden" from Auschwitz. Instead, most agree that there was no rescue from Auschwitz. According to Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann testified that even he could not rescue a "favorite" Jew from Auschwitz.

How do you remember a truth that will cause clinical depression? A truth that will cause a man or woman who "receives facts reasonably" to want to die? You steel yourself and remember it, that's all. The only hope you can derive from such a truth, clearly seen, is the resolve to act differently and to do your small part to make the world different than it is.

Comments

[trashcanglam.livejournal.com]

I heard it was a gas.

Sometimes my avatar really can be even more inappropriate than my comments

[rinku.livejournal.com]

weirdly coincidental, but i wrote an entry on this topic just yesterday: http://www.livejournal.com/users/rinku/719027.html

[nickys.livejournal.com]

> How do you remember a truth that will cause clinical depression? A truth that will cause a man or woman who "receives facts reasonably" to want to die? You steel yourself and remember it, that's all. The only hope you can derive from such a truth, clearly seen, is the resolve to act differently and to do your small part to make the world different than it is.

In some ways that's the whole art of living.

Terrible, unbelievably hideous things happen in the world all the time.

It wasn't just Auschwitz, it was Pinnochet, Somalia, Bosnia, Chechenya, the Taliban... Inhuman evil can be anywhere, everywhere.

And somehow, we have to face that without going insane. Do the little that we can to help, and try not to despair that it isn't going to be enough.