I have a photograph that my wife's grandmother lent me. It's a picture of my wife's great-great-uncle with his family. His name was Chasnela Agashov, possibly spelled Ogeshov or some such variety. When his two sisters left Kiev for the United States, he stayed. We don't know what his wife or son's name is, but we know his father's name was David, and his mother's name was Frumma.
Chasnela and his family were most likely murdered by the Nazis. We don't know for sure, though. I wrote to Yad Vashem to find out, but they had no record of anyone with that name.
We usually hear that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and that's a credible estimate. There may have been several hundred thousand more, but we can't be sure. Whole communities were annihilated, to the extent that not just people's lives but the memory of their existence was lost. A whole civilization - that of European Jewry - was lost, its history and its future were stolen from the community of the world.
I've entered some genealogical information for a friend of mine who lost her grandparents in the Shoah. I've entered their approximate dates of death, also typing out the words "Auschwitz, Poland" in their place of death.
All these little things I need to do, to make this real for me. And yet, of course, I can't make it real enough.
I lived in Austria for two years when I was a little boy. I wore Lederhosen, attended a village school, because indistinguishable from Austrians around me. This was outside a town called Hallein, just south of Salzburg. When I visited Yad Vashem's valley of communities, "Salzburg" was inscribed on the wall, along with names of smaller towns that had had Jewish communities. Much later, only in the last few years, I found out that Dachau had an annex in Hallein. In the cemeteries in Austria there are gravestones with photographs of men in Wehrmacht uniforms. But nobody talked about the work camp in their backyard, and when they threw a farewell party for my father, they told nasty antisemitic jokes.
And recently, I saw a documentary from Tyrol - the next "Land" over - in which an older man said of the blood libel, "Aber es ist eine Tatsache." (But it is a fact). There are people in Austria - probably more than we dare imagine - who believe that Jews ritually slaughter a non-Jewish child for Passover.
When I lived there, Austrians liked to present themselves as victims of the war, just like any other country attacked by the Nazis. They spoke of "das Graue des Krieges," the grayness of the war. Nobody there - in the early 70s - admitted to having been Nazis. There was a picture of Kurt Waldheim on the wall in school, and he was considered the progressive choice, over Bruno Kreisky.
I sometimes wonder: who is it more important to remember? The murderers, or their victims? What should weigh more heavily on (for example) the Austrians in Hallein and Vigaun - the people and the communities they lost, or the despicable murderers they produced?
This is an easier day to bear if we can focus on the sadness. Sadness is infinite, but it is a noble sentiment. It is a lot harder to confront feelings of rage, vindictiveness, fear, and (worst of all) foreboding.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center reports that Sweden and Norway refuse to systematically investigate Nazi war criminals within their borders because the statute of limitations has run out on their alleged crimes. They are waiting for the perpetrators to die of old age so Norwegian and Swedish society doesn't have to go through the discomfort of trying old people with a monstrous past.
I have another photograph as well. It's of my great-uncle Sverre Knutsen, who was in the Norwegian resistance during the war. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis, but was lucky and survived. He was appointed district attorney immediately after Norway was liberated on May 8th, 1945. One of the first things he did - probably on May 8th - was to liberate the Russian POW camp in his area.
My uncle had much better odds of surviving than any Jewish prisoner, and the Russian POW camp was nothing like the death camps. And my uncle never really talked about his own time as a prisoner. But he did speak about his responsibilities are a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals. He wanted to bring them to justice in a way that proved to post-war Norwegians that they lived in a just and civilized society.
This morning, cars in Israel pulled over at 10 am and stood in silent memory and witness of the Shoah. Israel doesn't have military parades. Israelis argue endlessly about what is fair and just, how much mercy and charity they should extend to their enemies, what kind of society they want to be. Yom HaShoah is a day of sadness.
Yom HaShoah should be observed in all of Europe too, but as a day of shame. Europeans should ask themselves again and again how they could let this happen. They should study Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraqi Kurdistan, Cambodia, and other places to understand why it continues to happen.
They should have museums with mirrors.
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