Interfaith and International Calendar
Citizens Eye is grateful to Julian Harrison of Leicestershire County Council for allowing the reproduction in full of his address at the County Council’s Holocaust Memorial Day event on Monday 28th January.
Holocaust Memorial Day 2008 Address
‘Imagine, Remember, Reflect, React’
The theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2008 is ‘Imagine, Remember, Reflect, React’. It encourages people to attempt to internalise what the Holocaust and genocide means. What it was and is. How it was and is. And why it was and, tragically still is in many places in the modern world. It asks us to learn some lessons and increase our understanding and comprehension. It also asks us not to be innocent bystanders, but to take whatever action we can to alleviate and eradicate the seeds of such atrocities, namely racism and discrimination in whatever form they take.
This year’s theme also encourages us to look at how human beings have expressed their experiences of the Holocaust and of other genocides through creative means, and equally how these experiences have inspired creativity in others. The exhibition here in the Members Lounge today attempts in a little way to reflect the capacity of human beings to still reach within themselves, despite unthinkable suffering and fright, to produce works of great art, books and poetry of magnitude and depth, and music of yearning and reflection. They inspire us because at times when they must have questioned the humanity of others, at times when they were stripped of simple human dignities, they remained essentially and unequivocally ‘human’ through demonstrating and using their talents and skills and showing enormous and unbelievable degrees of courage and perseverance.
The exhibition focuses on the Holocaust, but it also provides examples from more recent genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. It is but a small consolation within the more telling realisation that the human race hasn’t always learned the lessons of past atrocities, to also think that artistic creativity and brave acts of dignity, sacrifice and the love of, and commitment to, others, still prevail.
The exhibition also looks at what was lost to the world. How the talents, skills and decent human endeavours were not only stifled but forcibly removed from existence. It shows Nazi censorship in all its illogical, depraved and self-defeating reality. How the regime attempted to impose a warped and racially derived type of culture not only on its own people, but on those its armies went on to conquer.
You will see that the exhibition devotes a lot of space to the ghetto town and concentration facility of Terezín in the Czech Republic. Or to give it its more infamous German moniker, Theresienstadt. There are of course many links between this focus on one location and the wider consideration of the Holocaust in general, but there is a more specific connection between Terezín and artistic creativity during the course of the genocide. I had the great fortune to visit Terezín a month ago and for me, its former ghetto inhabitants produced some of the most vivid, most illustrative and most haunting art, music and poetry of the Holocaust.
This requires an explanation of the unique circumstances of Terezín within the context of the Holocaust as a whole. Located some 60 km or so north of Prague, the town was essentially always an army garrison. Following the Nazi invasion, it was decided that the town, because of its enclosed, walled environment and the close proximity of a military prison, should effectively become a ghetto for the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia and other bordering countries. The Nazis, cynically and with an eye for propaganda and evasion, viewed it as a ‘model’ Jewish settlement. Indeed, in one of the most tragically nauseating examples of propaganda and deception ever conceived, they made a film, entitled ‘Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt’ – in English ‘The Führer gives the Jews a Town’. The film was one outcome of a complete charade. In order to demonstrate to suspicious members of the International Red Cross that living conditions were acceptable and that ghetto inmates had the freedom to play football, take part in musical performances, and play, meet and socialise in apparently ‘normal’ ways, Terezín was temporarily transformed into something that in reality, it wasn’t, for the benefit of the international community and the cameras. Once the charade was over and the visiting Red Cross officials had left, those taking part in the film were put into cattle wagons and transported to Auschwitz where they met their deaths. Terezín then resorted back to what it was – a prison, a holding facility and a link in the chain of death that would end horrifically in the likes of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor.
However, in a remarkable example of the strength of the human will and of the human desire to create in the most mitigating of circumstances, the inhabitants of Terezín always retained a capacity to express themselves, mostly surreptitiously, though sometimes with the passive knowledge of their captors who of course, also had prior knowledge of their ultimate fate. They wrote, they produced newsletters and articles, they enjoyed musical and operatic performance and most famously, they painted.
The artwork of Terezín was considerable. However, it is the art produced by its younger inhabitants that has most served to create the legacy and fame of the Czech town. Children were encouraged by one teacher in particular, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, to convey in drawings and paintings both the reality of their current situation, their former homes and also their hopes and aspirations for the future and their dreams and idealised perceptions of their lives. Copies of many of these pictures adorn the walls of the Ghetto Museum in present-day Terezín and can also be found in modern books and on websites. In the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, which I also visited in December, the first floor is devoted entirely to an exhibition of the children’s artwork. It was the most moving of experiences to see hope as well as despair portrayed through the eyes of children. Many of the pictures draw obvious immediate and visible parallels with pictures by young children the world over. However, many don’t. It is always tempting to think of innocence, that the artists had little or no knowledge of their predicament. However, the awful reality is that many obviously did and this is depicted in their sketchings and through the use of paint. Those images that don’t visibly portray horror or sadness reveal these feelings almost by symbiosis, as if the paintbrushes or pencils themselves have become an extension of the children’s hands and bodies and are telling a different story. Most upsetting for me was a very simple depiction of a lady by a young girl called Eva. Its title was distressingly simple as well. ‘Maminka’. Mummy.
It is probably the age of their creators that makes these pieces of art most poignant and illustrative of the horrific and deliberate waste of human creative skills and of life in general. Though they may have had an inkling of what was to come and obviously were experiencing the troubled reality of discrimination in their daily lives, how could the children of Terezín fully understand why this was happening? How, with their youth, could they comprehend why some people seemed intent not only to inflict pain and death, but also to do so devoid of any pity or compassion and sometimes even with pleasure? How do you explain evil?
Though sometimes a full explanation might not be possible, we can realise the existence of evil and its associated manifestations of persecution, prejudice and discrimination, and attempt to do something about it. This is what we are encouraged to do through Holocaust Memorial Day. As far as children and young people are concerned, we can not only protect them but also educate them so that they have the skills and motivation to challenge and perhaps do what past generations have been unable to do – end discrimination and ultimately, prevent genocide. We can help to free the minds of our children and young people of the desire to discriminate, by talking and practicing compassion, equality and the duties and joys of helping our fellow human beings. Recourse to Terezín and those youthful drawings and paintings would be a fitting first step.
We cannot afford to think of the past solely in terms of ‘what’s done is done’. In Leicestershire today, we have our own parallels of the children of Terezín. For example, we have young asylum seekers who have escaped the horrors of war, conflict and persecution in the likes of Bosnia and parts of Africa and the Middle East. Their imaginations have been tainted considerably by their experiences. We can talk to these young people, pay more attention to what they have to say and try to share their burdens and alleviate their current hardship. We can ease and comfort their troubled minds. We can bring them some hope and some joy. This can be our ‘reaction’ to their life situations.
Imagine. Remember, Reflect. React. I would also like to add ‘be proactive’. We can always learn more about the past and perhaps particularly about the tragedies of the past. The Holocaust and other genocides is a vast learning experience for all of us, whatever our current degree of knowledge or expertise. And yet, if we have learned the very basics of the reality of these cataclysmic events, we should be in a position to do things, however small, that can prevent the wheels of ultimate genocide beginning to turn. We can learn more about what makes people who are different or who may appear to us to be different in our immediate locality, tick. What they believe in, how and why they do so. Where they come from, what they eat, what they watch on television, how they speak, how they socialise, what their joys and pleasures are and what makes them frightened or wary. In doing so, we may just realise what should be obvious. That we are all different and unique in so many ways and that we share far more than we probably first imagined. Getting to know people, appreciating them, learning from them, respecting them, giving to them as well as taking from them. It’s about human interaction and surely more effective and rewarding human interaction would be a powerful preventative remedy to discrimination and prejudice.
I have tried both in this short address and in the exhibition here today to tell and portray personal stories, feelings and emotions. I have tried, in effect, to reflect the essence of being a human being. To make things ‘human’. The Nazis did the opposite. They de-humanised their victims. They treated them as commodities, as spoilt and disposable goods. They reflected this in their treatment of them as well as their recording of them, simply as statistics, as numbers. We need to learn from this and do the opposite. We need to humanise the statistics of racism, discrimination and genocide and think always of the experiences of human beings. We can do this by relaying stories, of encouraging others to gain knowledge and understanding, by expressing our emotions and thoughts through vehicles such as art and music, by helping to build bridges. By personal example in all we do and say we can and must make a difference. This is our responsibility to ourselves and to others. It is also our duty to all the victims of the Holocaust and other genocides.
In these concluding words, my thoughts return to the children of Terezín and in particular to those who perished, victims of human brutality, whose lasting visible legacies are heart-rending simple pictures of their everyday lives, but whose voices, feelings and thoughts and whose humanity have somehow transcended time.
