How do we remember?

Reflections on memorials as Yom Hashoah nears.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

Hinda Avery came late to the study of Holocaust memorialization. A retired professor of women's studies at the University of British Columbia, Avery had taken up genealogy as an avocation and was travelling in the ancestral hometown of her mother's family in Poland.

"When I retired, I just thought I wanted to find out about my family," she said. But the visit to Staszow, near Krakow, raised more questions than it answered for the Vancouver-born Avery. On one visit, her hotel room window overlooked the town square, where Staszow's Jews, including Avery's aunt and grandmother, had been rounded up before deportation. Despite the Nazis' notoriously scrupulous record- keeping, Avery has been able to find no reference to the eventual fate of her mother's kin. What she did find was a Jewish cemetery that, nearly 60 years after the end of the Nazi era, was just being restored to something close to its original state. Centuries-old tombstones that had been covered over by dirt and grass (either by the passing of time or by deliberate anti-Semitic effort) were being unearthed, cleaned up and re-erected. But during her most recent visit to the town, a couple of months ago, she walked to the cemetery with the director of the town's museum, who had been involved in the restoration project. To their horror, they discovered the restored tombstones and a monument to the victims of Nazism had been desecrated with swastikas.

The ghastly graffiti bore the stench of a violent past and serves as a reminder that hatred remains alive even as the societies that were overtaken by Nazism struggle to articulate a sense of regret and recrimination for past atrocities.

The restoration of a graveyard in a remote Polish village is a simple act of humanity in the aftermath of a cataclysmic century of genocide in Europe. Respect for the memory of the dead in this small way is all a town can do to attempt to atone for its past, yet even this small act can be undermined by the most visceral acts of vandalism.

Despite the heartbreaking desecration, though, the cemetery's restoration project is notable for the people who are behind it. Before the war, Staszow was a town of about 10,000 people, half of them Jewish. It now has a population of about 14,000 – and not a single Jew, according to Avery. It is the Poles in the town who have undertaken the cemetery's revival and it is the Poles who will struggle to erase the hatred sprayed on the tombstones they have uncovered.

Relatively small acts like the repair of a cemetery are taking place across Europe, as are a few massive efforts at finding some way to mark the legacy of unimaginable horror left by the Nazi regime. And a dramatic, passionate discussion is occurring over the proper manner to commemorate the Holocaust; a historical event so monstrous and monumental that it defies human capacity for commemoration.

As Yom Hashoah – the day set aside annually to remember the victims of Nazism – nears (April 29 this year), the evolving discussion of Holocaust memorialization continues, as does the ongoing struggle to find some way to mark the tragedy in an adequate fashion. The debate has taken some unanticipated turns recently and some voices in the discussion are calling for acts so radical that they could redefine our very concept of memorials.

Preconceived notions

Through her numerous trips to Europe visiting and studying Holocaust memorials, Avery has learned to avoid preconceived notions. Some observers argue that the former West Germany did a better job than the former communist states of memorializing the Holocaust and preserving the concentration camps as educational facilities. Avery demurs, citing the Buchenwald National Memorial, in former East Germany, which has a monument to resistors and prisoners who revolted on the outside of the main camp property, as well as a monument inside the camp devoted to Jewish victims. She noted that the construction of monuments began earlier in East Germany than in the west, though some of those clearly had propagandistic undercurrents extolling the victory of the communists over fascism. Nevertheless, the Buchenwald memorial opened in 1951, which suggests that, with the planning and construction taking time, the idea must have begun quite soon after liberation.

At Dachau, another of the camps that was under communist control after 1945, a different sort of memorial has been created. Notable, particularly in an officially atheist society, was the creation of a Catholic place of worship and reflection on the site in 1961, followed by Protestant and Jewish equivalents four years later. The Jewish Memorial Temple, as it is called, is shaped like a crematorium oven.

Meanwhile, breathtaking structures like the Jewish Museum in Berlin have opened in recent years. The museum is an anarchic design, with shards representing a Magen David skewed in all directions to depict the wrenching destruction of European Jewry.

Some German responses

Last month, construction finally began on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The project had been mired in controversy and false starts over the past decade as debate raged over the appropriateness of various designs. In the end, American architect Peter Eisenman's design – 2,700 concrete slabs upended like tombstones over a space twice that of a football field – is intended to be completed in time for the 60th anniversary of the end of the Third Reich, which falls in 2005.

The monument, adjacent to Berlin's famed Brandenburg Gate, seems certain to become one of the most noted monuments to the Shoah, but Avery argues it may not be the best.

"It's too massive," she said. "It's too obvious, too literal, too ostentatious.... That's my reaction to the model."

The monuments that have really moved Avery tend to be the more subtle, often smaller efforts. For example, in one Berlin neighborhood that once housed many Jews, 80 discreet signposts are dispersed throughout the public areas, itemizing the incremental steps that led to the Final Solution. One, representing an early act of the Nazi regime, states that a German postal worker married to a Jew may not keep his job. The other 79 posts follow the history of the Holocaust up to its most violent conclusion.

"These short little statements say a tremendous amount," said Avery.

There are large monuments that Avery thinks make their point well, though. In another example, a huge concrete wall has had abstract human forms chiseled out of it, symbolic perhaps of an absence of life.

Focus on perpetrators?

The Holocaust has presented such a challenge to the keepers of memory that it has inspired some of the most radical ideas ever conceived to mark an historic event. While traditional monuments often depicted victorious generals on horseback, or royalty in poses of authority, the Holocaust has forced artists to rethink the very basis of their crafts.

Some of the most radical ideas have come from Dr. Matthias Heyl, the education director at the memorial centre attached to the former women's concentration camp of Ravensbrück, in northern Germany. Avery met with Heyl on a recent trip to the camp (which is the subject of a current exhibit at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre) and was intrigued by some of his ideas for memorialization.

For one thing, Heyl believes the time has come to de-emphasize the victims and begin to take a closer look at the perpetrators of the crimes. For example, a new exhibit being planned at Ravensbrück will feature the 3,500 women who were guards at the facility. This presents special problems.

"They don't want to humanize these women," said Avery. So how does a facility depict these people for whom evil became a nine-to-five job? "Should they get the worst photographs they can find of these women?" Avery asked.

An exhibit focusing on perpetrators creates questions like these that are not usually raised when memorializing the victims.

Perhaps even more radical is another of Heyl's ideas, which is essentially an exact opposite to the construction of monuments. Because many of the buildings used by the Nazis are still standing, some being used as German government offices and for other purposes, Heyl would like to see young Germans literally destroy their country's Nazi past. As Avery interprets Heyl's scheme: "German students should be given hammers and chisels and literally destroy these things that were used by the Nazis."

It is not an entirely new concept. We saw it happen with the Berlin Wall, representing the end of a different form of tyranny.

Perhaps most provocative of Heyl's ideas is the very personalized suggestion he has that, instead of learning about the facts and details of the Holocaust from teachers and Holocaust educators like himself, Heyl suggests that students research their own families' involvement and complicity in the Nazi era. Despite the evolution of monuments reflecting the grotesque past of the German state, most German families remain deeply private about their own actions during that period. Heyl's proposal would no doubt make for some bitter family meetings.

An inversion of memory

James E. Young, a professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has studied the manner in which Germany and other countries have memorialized the Shoah. In his book At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, he describes some of the more radical proposals that have gone unfulfilled. In one instance, an artist suggested grinding up the Brandenburg Gate and sprinkling its remnants on its former site to remember "a destroyed people with a destroyed monument."

In another example of inverted memorialization – this one realized – the same artist suggested a negative recreation of a town fountain that had been destroyed by the Nazis because it had been funded, in 1908, by money from a Jewish citizen. The fountain had been a centrepoint of the town of Kassel until its destruction and it was partially restored in the 1960s. But Horst Hoheisel was commissioned to invert the very concept of a fountain by creating a mirror image of the fountain sunk beneath the original, its water flowing downward through a funnel of darkness, rather than upward in the conventional joyous spray of other fountains.

Radical responses such as these are examples of attempts to remember the tragedies of the 1930s and '40s, but there are those who view warily any monuments, whether conservative or radical. In his book, Young points out the danger of monuments providing a false sense of memory. He writes: "[T]he German historian Martin Broszat suggested that in their references to history, monuments may not remember events so much as bury them altogether beneath layers of national myth and explanation."

An individual who is a leader of a Jewish communal organization in Germany told Avery, in what may be the ultimate condemnation of memorialization, that the construction of monuments and museums to the lost Jews may be a waste of money better spent on social services for the mass of Jews moving to Germany from the former Soviet Union. The monuments and museums may be mere propaganda, according to this official, aimed at making Germans feel better, but reflecting, ultimately an undercurrent that Avery paraphases as reflecting a German government attitude that "prefers dead Jews to live ones."

Avery herself disagrees with this perspective, seeing the work being done as undertaken with genuine concern and providing monuments that do help educate and remember.

Memorial debate rages

Yet the debate continues to rage over how to mark the legacy of Nazism, just as similar debates are emerging in North America in relation to our own histories of subjugation of First Nations people, Japanese-Canadians, the Downtown Eastside's missing women and other individuals and groups. Rarely, though, does discussion reach the imaginative levels of Holocaust memorialists in Europe, particularly Germany.

Yet, as we prepare to gather in the annual solemn procession of Yom Hashoah, it is worth remembering that not all memorials are tangible – nor even negative representations like the fountain of Kassel.

In his masterpiece of the sanctity of the Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel writes of the interrelated importance of space and time, suggesting that moments of memory and spiritual awakening can be as important in the process of monumentalizing as a tangible monument to an event:

"We are all infatuated with the splendor of space, with the grandeur of things of space.... We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things."

The immediacy of monuments and their educational impact has brought about a healthy discussion of the methods we use to remember. But simple acts like the candlelighting and Kaddish that comprise the annual Yom Hashoah evening are monuments as well – monuments of time.

Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and commentator.

This year's Yom Hashoah cemetery service, with guest speaker Daniel Leipnik, will take place at noon Sunday, April 27, at the Schara Tzedeck cemetery, 2345 Southwest Marine Dr. The Yom Hashoah commemorative evening, with the Jewish Men's Choir and violinist Gabriel Bolkosky, director of the Phoenix Ensemble, takes place Monday, April 28, at 7:30 p.m. at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue.

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