mf@cornell.UUCP (mf) (05/02/85)
Lest we forget... It is very easy to dismiss the strong reactions to this president's visit to ``that'' cemetery. After all, aren't they dead, shouldn't our memories be dead too? In the last few days, I have spoken with many a survivor from the camps, as well as refugees and people who had lived hidden, in fear, anguish and famine. If they were silent up to now, it is because of the excrutiating pain *they* feel when remembering, and it is because of the silence imposed upon them by those who don't want to hear and who don't want to know. How can one forgive and forget in their name? Theirs is a testimony against a system which did not respect the elementary rights of everyone to his own originality and particularity, not only about a fact of dead history, but an evidence of an ever-present reality. Their stories are ones of despair and hope, a very topical warning to all of those who did not believe then and want to forget today, to those who look at the serene and pastoral ruins of the camps sincerely believing that they signify the death of a plague rather than the birth of a new evil, and who pretend to believe that all this is of one time and one country and who do not hear that people cry unceasingly. If you don't know what I am talking about, find someone who lived this season in hell, and listen. Or watch. ``Night and Fog,'' say. Here are some personal sketches a friend and I heard. Frederika, a very old woman, was telling me how the quotas prevented her from entering the USA with her family, and how, consequently, she had to go to Australia, while her mother and 3 sisters died in Theresienstad. Irmgard told me how she was imprisoned and tatooed (41-965) and later made, along with other women, to stand in the courtyard of Auschwitz and watch 3 women being hanged. When she lowered her head so as not to see, a German soldier hit her with the butt of his gun and told her "You pig, you are supposed to watch." As the Russians approached, she with other prisoners were packed like cattle in open wagons and shipped for days without food and under snow and rain to yet another concentration camp. Upon her arrival here, she had to endure the guilt for having survived and be a living testimony of the human-imposed barbarism, imposed by her by complacent and well-fed people. In spite of all, she is one of the most wonderful, intelligent and gentle women I know. And she is still afraid, and she still has nightmares. Mira couldn't tell me a thing, it is too painful for her, but her friend told me some of the things that had happened to her: her husband taken out of her house and shot in the street, her son (or nephew, I don't recall) thrown live in the flames, her stay in one of the worst camps, finally to be sent into the sea in boats without food or steering means, and at every attempt at approaching the shore--to be machine-gunned by the Nazis (they were rescued by the Russians). A friend's mother was raped by a nazi soldier while she watched her husband being shot. Surviving that seems herculean... Ernestine had her father taken out and shot (in Austria) because he was Catholic and socialist. I had a friend in Tucson. He was hidden by a Christian lady in Belgium for the duration. One year, on Christmas eve, he decided to take the chance to go out and buy her a Christmas present to thank her. As he approached the house after shopping, he saw the SS cars out front, so slipped into a doorway and waited. Apparently, the SS had been told she was hiding a Jew; when they came, she expressed shock that they could even think such a thing, and invited them to search the premises to confirm that no one else was there. He was in hiding for something like four years -- he only left the house that once for a couple hours. Such a narrow escape haunts him still. Collective memory, collective pains. If the only death that one knows of is that of actors on a stage (who miraculously resurrect at the end of the movie), of ridiculous Nazis in a sitcom, of Riefenstahl's pageants, lack of empathy and sensitivity makes more ... sense. Especially when political expediency is concerned.