Always Remember

Caleb Crain has a well-written piece in the New Yorker online, an obituary of sorts, regarding his teacher, Peter Kussi, a Czech who emigrated to the United States when the shadow of Hitler loomed near Czechloslovakia in 1939.  Kussi's father was born in the U.S. and was able to obtain a passport to this country as a result.  The Kussis were Jewish.  Crain's article traces the impact of the Holocaust on Kussi's life and work through the letter one of Kussi's uncles had written him from Czechloslovakia in 1942, before being deported to Auschwitz. As Crain writes,

Kussi didn’t receive the letter until 1944, and in January of that year Jiří Eisenstein was deported to Auschwitz, where he died. His wife, Mimi Eisenstein, was killed in the same camp in March, 1944.

Human tragedy is not unique to the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. Jiri Eisenstein himself compared the activities of the Germany to those of the Turks against the Armenians:

The setting is a different one, the procedure is more refined, as beho[o]ves people who live in the centre of Europe, yet the spirit is the same, perhaps even more cruel behind the mask of orderliness and flawless organization.

Nevertheless, the Holocaust leaves a scar on the memory of humankind because of "the mask of orderliness and flawless organization."  In short, the Holocaust represented the industrialization of genocide.  Not only did the concentration camps function as models of industrial efficiency, they were also beset with bureaucratic banalities (as Hannah Arendt so astutely recognized) that rendered the extermination of human life, in many cases, almost secondary to procedure, quota, and supply chain management.  In many ways, this represents the horror of the Holocaust as much as anything else:  that it became ordinary, routinized.

Several years ago I attended the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  I do not exaggerate when I write that the experience moved me in the most profound way possible.  I particularly remember an exhibit in which shoes upon shoes upon shoes were piled up behind museum glass.  Visitors were informed that these were the shoes of children who died in concentration camps.  I stood before the shoes mute, tears welling up in my eyes, wanting to explode in a supernova of grief.  So all encompassing was my sorrow and disgust that I thought I could swallow the world with it.

And yet, the shoes of these children represented, for the administrators of death, a byproduct of an industrial process, industrial waste, if you will.  This realization caused, if it is possible, redoubled disgust and fury.  These shoes once adorned the feet of children.  Children who liked ice cream and sat on their fathers' laps while being read to.  Children who danced and laughed and cried when they scraped their knees.  Children who were born into a world of doom through no fault of their own.  Children.  These shoes were traces of the children.  There can be no adequate answer to the question of how this could have happened?  Any rationalization, however accurate, melts in the face of the enormous sorrow that attends the industrial act of brutality.

Jiri Eisenstein wrote to his nephew of the memory of what happened to the Jews of central Europe:

you may be reminded of the tragedy your people went through, and curiosity being inborn to mankind, you might give them a few thoughts—how did they bear it, how did they live, what did they suffer, which were their hopes, longings and comfort?

These were not my 'people,' but the scale and international scope of the Holocaust makes Kussi's people everyone's people, in a sense.   As such, it is incumbent upon all of us who are heirs to the history and traditions of the West to give the persons who lived through and died in the Holocaust more than a few thoughts.  We must do so not because any reminder of the Holocaust will prevent it from happening again.  Genocide will take whatever terrible forms contemporary technology, political organization, and hatred offer.  It is folly to suggest otherwise.  Still, giving thought to those persons whose life ended in or was indelibly scarred by the Holocaust is a necessary act of contrition and acknowledgement that every life must be elevated above process, bureaucracy, and convenience.  It is a necessary acknowledgement that we are responsible as individuals to behave in an objectively ethical way toward our fellow human beings.  We cannot hide behind the veil of the crowd or the mandate of the state.  Giving thought to the children who wore those shoes is a perpetual reminder that we owe our fellow human beings a duty of care, that we are obliged to consider them always as human beings, as our equals in moral worth if in no other way.

I would like to give some thought to the children who died or lived through the Holocaust.  I would like to perform my act of contrition and remembrance.  I would like to remind readers that we owe the children of our world today a moral duty to acknowledge them and to ensure that they are treated with the dignity and respect befitting all human beings, that the children of the Holocaust serve as a perpetual reminder of our duty to the living as well as to the memory of the dead.

I am not sure how many are familiar with the children of the Terezin Concentration Camp (known also as Theresienstadt), but their story is a remarkable one.

A total of 15,000 children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp between the years 1942 and 1944; less than 100 survived. (Volavková, Hana. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezín Concentration Camp, 1942-1944. New York: Schocken, 1978).

  While at the Camp, many of the children of Terezin wrote poems and drew pictures.  Despite the odds, a number of the poems and drawings have been preserved.

In these poems and pictures created by the young inmates of Terezin, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their courage and optimism, their hopes and fears. (Id.)

These are the children of Terezin.  They were children like any other children for whom humanity failed.  Read their words and meditate on what it would have been like to be a Jewish child, one of the 1.5 million that died, in the Holocaust.  Meditate on what it would have been like to see hope squashed constantly and yet to still feel hope against reason, how painful that sliver of possible deliverance must have been knowing you held it against all reason.  Meditate on what it would have been like to be twelve years old and to lose hope.

Here is a poem written by a child named Franta Bass:

THE GARDEN

Only take heed, and keep your soul diligently, Lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, And lest they depart from your hearts all the days of your life; Make them known to your children and your children's children.
--Deuteronomy 4:9

A little garden,
Fragrant and full of roses.
The path is narrow
And a little boy walks along it. 

A little boy, a sweet boy,
Like that growing blossom.
When the blossom comes to bloom,
The little boy will be no more.

Here is another by a child named Michael Flack:

ON A SUNNY EVENING 

On a purple, sun-shot evening
Under wide-flowering chestnut trees
Upon the threshold full of dust
Yesterday, today, the days are all like these.
Trees flower forth in beauty,
Lovely too their very wood all gnarled and old
That I am half afraid to peer
Into their crowns of green and gold.
The sun has made a veil of gold
So lovely that my body aches.
Above, the heavens shriek with blue
Convinced I've smiled by some mistake.
The world's abloom and seems to smile.
I want to fly but where, how high?
If in barbed wire, things can bloom
Why couldn't I? I will not die!

We are shamed by the fact that a child could write the line, "The little boy will be no more," and yet the indomitable human spirit of "[i]f in barbed wire, things can bloom/Why couldn't I? I will not die!" ennobles us and gives us hope in equal measure.  In our shame and wonder at the children of Terezin we can, in small measure, redeem our world if we take our shame and wonder and turn it into action.  There are little boys and girls in this country for whom life seems as fleeting as the boy in the "Garden."  It is within our power to help these children learn that life does not have to be all deprivation and precariousness.  Whether it is through mentoring or community involvement or political action, everyone can do something to turn the our shame and wonder at the children of Terezin into positive action in our world.

In considering the children of Terezin and the Holocaust we face a constant reminder of the moral obligation we have to our fellow human beings to treat them as moral equals.  While the poems still break my heart and the shoes at the Holocaust Museum stoke fury and almost limitless despair in me, when I turn my attention to them and consider the children who wrote the poems and wore the shoes I am elevating the children above the casual death of the concentration camps.  I am pulling them out of the banalities of the bureaucratic death machine and putting them first.  I am elevating the children above their prison.  I remember the children above all else.