Misunderstanding the Holocaust

The date of the Holocaust Memorial Day is approaching and the world mass-media system is getting ready to strongly cover the story.

TV and radio shows are being excitedly prepared, movies will be released (Hitchcock’s restored documentary Memory of the Camps has already been announced in grand style) and new books will be published to strategically benefit from the great attention temporary drawn on the issue.

 

In the recently published short pamphlet entitled Contro il Giorno della Memoria (Against the Holocaust Memorial Day) the Italian author and Jewish culture expert Elena Loewenthal writes: “Memory carries no hope with it. The awareness of pain is not a vaccine. «We must remember to ensure it never happens again» is an empty sentence.” This is likely to promptly restart the debate over the convenience to renew this dramatic memory. One that can really make us feel ashamed to be part of the human race.

The question is: Does the knowledge only take to rejection or may also generate emulation?

 

On a strict mass communications basis, it’s agreed that any story exposed to a strong media coverage for a short time span only, possibly becomes the umpteenth entry on our overloaded agendas. It is therefore ignored or superficially adapted to simply confirm pre-existing opinions.

In the first case, a far from the eyes far from the heart surviving strategy leads to no major consequences. It’s just a personal choice. In the second, it all depends on the opinions: sometimes it’s better to let the sleeping dog lie.

 

On another side, if books, essays and studies can offer a broader look, such a complex matter is bound to be necessarily streamlined by mass-media. And, as the Canadian author and researcher Arthur Kroker says in his 1994 book Data Tash: “When knowledge is reduced to information, then consciousness is stripped of its lived connection to history, judgment, and experience.”

 

Among history, judgment, and experience probably the latter is the key. I can still remember, after so many years, a scene from a war movie showing a soldier torturing a prisoner using a dental drill. I could really understand, almost feel and share, the pain. Much more than while watching a medieval knight stretched on a rack, screaming. All of us have sat on a dental chair at least once but none of us has ever experienced a torture device back in the Middle Ages.

 

It would be helpful, as much as painful, for anyone to personally visit an extermination camp and walk through that gate under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign and you can be sure it’s the most effective way to finally give due weight to the facts. Not the voices of the survivors, not the pictures of the mass graves, not the verses of the poets.

 

I’m afraid as Herman Melville’s Clarel was: “The light is greater, hence the shadow more”.

A well-balanced communications system, I modestly think, should push no information to those who want to forget but strongly pull to the sources anyone seeking knowledge. Most of all, as a sign of respect, it must not spread around stories in a cheap way: they might be dangerously misunderstood.