(Author: Shirli Gilbert, Vol. 68, No. 3, Chanukah 2013)
The first time South African Jews commemorated the Holocaust, it didn’t yet have a name. In December 1942, barely a year since the first Nazi death camp had begun its grisly work at Chelmno, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and SA Zionist Federation called a nationwide Day of Mourning. Packed services were held at shuls in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. “Women wept and looked dumb with agony”, reported one local newspaper. Less than half of the Jewish community at that time was South African-born. The rest had come directly from Eastern Europe, and what was happening there – in their hometowns, to their communities, to their family members – was beyond the capacity of imagination to grasp. Through 1943 and 1944, while the gas chambers continued to ceaselessly operate, and rifle fire rang out in ghettos and towns and forests from Berlin to Bialystok, South African Jews protested, mourned and remembered.
The Allied armies’ victory in 1945 eventually came and went, and millions of soldiers and Displaced Persons across Europe returned to their homes and families. Meanwhile, Jews awoke slowly to the immensity of their loss. Entire branches of family trees had been abruptly and violently severed. Vital institutions of communal and spiritual life had disappeared with few traces. The genocide wrought tectonic shifts in Jewish life and identity that were not easily comprehended or addressed. What was the Jewish world without its wellspring in Eastern Europe? Who would be its rabbis, its intellectuals, its politicians, its leaders? Was it now in America? In Palestine? From our present-day perspective, it is difficult to understand the depth of the existential uncertainty this caused for a tiny community at the tip of the African continent. South Africa was at that time in the throes of its own vicious racial and political wars, which would culminate in the victory of the National Party just three years after the end of the war. For Jews in this country, the rise to power of the so-called ‘Malanazis’ was a frightening blow to their already deep sense of weakness and vulnerability.
In my work as a historian of the Holocaust I have traced how our community has remembered the Shoah since these early wartime years, and my words today are shaped by the many things I have discovered and learned. But it is only partly as a historian that I offer you my thoughts about the significance of remembering, seventy years almost to the day since the Warsaw ghetto rose up in the flames of Jewish resistance. The Shoahwas a quiet but constant presence in my childhood Johannesburg home, evident in the prohibition on throwing away any morsel of food, the ingenious economy with which every part of the chicken was used, and the periodic Yiddish references to what had happened ‘over there’ –dortn. My mother’s parents, young newlyweds full of hope and promise when they arrived in Warsaw from the shtetlach, were imprisoned in the ghetto along with hundreds of thousands of their fellow Jews in 1940. Like many others, they endured hunger, deprivation, and unthinkable loss – of a child, parents, siblings, community and entire existence. Unlike most, they managed to make it out alive through a combination of initiative and sheer luck, though in my childish awareness their story felt curiously distant: bombs dropping over Warsaw, illicit border-crossings, Siberian labour camps. The photographs on my grandmother’s wall evoked a vanished world that I spent hours trying to imagine, but by the time my flood of questions about ‘over there’ was unleashed, she was no longer around to answer. It is her memory and the memory of millions of others like her that has motivated my work over the past fifteen years, and that serves as a constant reminder to me that in addition to its courageous fighters, the Warsaw ghetto housed hundreds of thousands of ordinary Jewish men and women, no different to you or me, whose prime resistance was enduring from one day to the next as best they could, in circumstances they could never in their wildest imaginations have conceived.
South African Jews began to remember the Shoah sooner, more widely, and more prominently than almost any other Jewish community in the world. The Shoah became a central part of how we understood ourselves and our place in the world, as human beings, as South Africans, and most of all as Jews. As the years and decades passed, and as our existence here strengthened and deepened, so too did our remembrance. Our guiding lights were the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and their likeness in the soldiers of the state of Israel, who refused to entrust the Jewish future to an impassive and indifferent world. Each year, we remembered how millions of Jews had been taken to their deaths while the world stood by and watched. Each year, as today, we sang the partisans’ song, Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letstn veg (“Never say that you are on the final road”), with its proud affirmation of Jewish endurance: Mir zaynen do! (“We are here!”).
By the early 1990s, the Holocaust was no longer our property alone. As our nation began the long process of coming to terms with its own racist and violent past, the Holocaust was a fundamental point of reference. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was about restorative justice, in explicit contrast to the punitive justice of the Nuremburg trials. Experts on Holocaust trauma were brought in to facilitate rehabilitation workshops with victims of apartheid. Research on the psychology of Nazi perpetrators was used as a basis for examining the motivations of apartheid’s perpetrators. Our history was now on the national stage, and the lessons it taught were universal: the destructive consequences of racism, the value of tolerance and mutual respect, and our obligation as individuals and as a society to protect democracy and human rights. In one of his first public acts as president, Nelson Mandela proclaimed: ‘By honouring [Anne Frank’s] memory […], we are saying with one voice: Never and Never Again!’
In our early 21st Century world, more people than ever remember the genocide, and they do so by many names: the Shoah, the Churban, the Holocaust.
The UN has designated 27 January, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, as an international day of Holocaust commemoration. Each year, dozens of new courses are offered and hundreds of new books published. A recent count came up with more than sixty five Holocaust museums and education centres around the world, from Washington D.C. and Sydney to Fukuyama and Buenos Aires. In our own country, the Holocaust is an integral part of the national curriculum, and new museums have been created in Durban and Johannesburg, in addition to the original in Cape Town.
But amidst this abundance of memory, we are also quietly aware of the dwindling few who actually, directly remember. Only a small number of survivors remain among us, and they are gradually passing from our midst. For some survivors, even their own tireless efforts to recall and recount were never enough to convey what had happened to them, whether or not the world was listening. ‘The destruction […] was not told by anyone,’ wrote the Italian survivor Primo Levi. “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. […] We are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it, or have returned mute, but they are […] the drowned, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance.” Levi’s words were echoed by the survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who wrote: ‘Those who have not lived through the experience will never know. Those who have, will never tell; not really, not completely. The Past belongs to the dead.”
So what is the legacy with which we are left? Can we remember? And if, by commemorating the Shoah as we do today we affirm that we should continue to remember as best we can, how should we do that? Should we remember as Jews, ever alert to the threats directed against us by bigots of every national and religious stripe? Should we remember as Jews, wary of the blurry line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism? Or should we remember as South Africans, mindful of what it means to subjugate, deprive and dispossess a people solely on the basis of the colour of their skin? Should we remember as South Africans, having witnessed ourselves the persecution of another community in our midst? Or should we remember as human beings, conscious of the dangers of racism whatever form it takes, and the need to teach our children the necessity of tolerance and open-mindedness, both towards the familiar and that which has been designated to us?
Despite what we may have been told by our intellectuals, our rabbis, our politicians, and our leaders, these questions have no obvious answers. We should do well to listen once again to the inimitable words of Primo Levi, who opens his memoir with the following plea to us, the future generations:
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider it this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies by a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,Like a frog in winter.Never forget that this has happened.
Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts,
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children
.Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring turn their faces from you.
Each of us will decide for her- or himself what meaning to draw from the Shoah, so increasingly far from our present and yet still so fundamental to how we understand ourselves and our place in the world, as Jews, as South Africans, and as human beings. The past belongs to the dead, but it also – unavoidably, inescapably, necessarily – belongs to us. It is our responsibility not just to remember it, but to choose how we remember it to our children, and to our children’s children after them.
Dr Shirli Gilbert is Karten Senior Lecturer in History and Jewish/ non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. This article is based on her keynote address at the 2013 Yom Hashoah ceremony in Cape Town.
