Honoring victims of genocide, a universal need
Posted: Monday, April 02, 2007 7:59 AM
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Tel Aviv, Israel
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Tel Aviv Bureau Chief
The blog I posted last week "Holocaust survivors always 'survivors'" provoked so many interesting -- and contradictory -- comments that I’d like to respond.
Many readers shared memories, others sympathy, but a surprising number either denied the Holocaust ever happened or basically took the line: You weren’t the only ones, and stop whining already!
Now there’s nothing new about that. Martin Gilbert, the historian and Churchill’s official biographer, noted that in 1942 a British Member of Parliament stood in the House of Commons, and in response to growing rumors of the slaughter of Jews in Nazi concentration camps, complained about "those whining Jews."
Clearly genocide has not only targeted Jews, yet some readers raise the question, why do the Jews uniquely make such a meal out of it? Why can’t they get over it?
Personally I think it’s a stupid question, but since it appears to be a frequent one, I will try to give an answer.
The way I see it, remembering, and honoring the victims of genocide, is not a Jewish thing, it is a universal need.
'Never forget'
On a hill on the edge of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, is a squat concrete building that will tear your heart out. It contains photographs of victims, as well as the tools of their murder, and is built on the tombs of thousands of slaughtered Tutsis. When the Rwandan government wanted to build its own memorial to its 800,000 dead, it came to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust in Jerusalem, for advice.
And the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh is just one of many memorials in Cambodia that consists mostly of smashed skulls, a fraction of the million to two million killed by the Khmer Rouge during their deadly regime.
Nobody wants to forget, despite the efforts of perpetrators, their sympathizers and the ignorant. Why is the pain of Armenians still so fresh? Because Turkey still will not admit that it slaughtered a million Armenians early last century. Turkey still insists they were victims of war, and that only a fraction of that number really died.
Evil acts by states and the slaughter of innocents should not be forgotten, and nations should not be reprieved by history, or the lack of it.
When I read "King Leopold’s Ghost" by Adam Hochschild, I was astonished to read that Belgium, the colonial power in the Congo, had killed ten million Africans. Even though I lived in Africa for four years, I had no idea of the extent of the genocide. These are things everyone ought to know.
So do Jews whine more than others? I don’t think so. I have reported from Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, as well as Somalia, Kosovo and Gaza and a host of other painful places. I have not noticed any differences in the extent of pain, or how it is expressed. All families remember with the same pain, and all believe their tragedy should never be repeated anywhere.
I grew up in a rather dark home, burdened by memories. Every few days it seemed my father would light a Jahrzeitlicht, a candle in memory of somebody, and I would have to stand silently by his side as he held my hand and murmured some words of prayer: "This is the day Omi died of typhoid in Riga. This is the anniversary of Opi’s death in Majdanek. This is the day Otto was last heard of in Berlin. This is the day the Nazis took my mother. This is the day…Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald…Sobibor." My father tried to keep his family’s memory alive, with a little flame on a shelf, and then he would cry.
Does anybody really think he was making this up?
