Looking back on the Holocaust

Today

Auschwitz is something we should remember every day.

6,000,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis - let's reach to 6 million people who remember them!

איין מענטש געמאכט עס פּאַסירן –

One man

made it happen –

but many million people were responsible for

letting it happen

אָבער פילע מיליאָן מענטשן זענען געווען פאַראַנטוואָרטלעך פֿאַר

לעטינג עס פּאַסירן

6.5.2010

The Canadian Press – ONLINE EDITION

Children of Holocaust survivors feel need to keep memories alive: Morgentaler

TORONTO – Children of Holocaust survivors have more and more difficulty trying to make sense of what happened without actually having lived through it, says a University of Lethbridge professor.

Goldie Morgentaler described her secondhand Holocaust experience as the daughter of survivors in conjunction with a memorial program marking the 67th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Canadian Jewish News reported in a recent edition.

The program was sponsored by the Workmen’s Circle, a 100-year-old Toronto organization promoting social and economic justice, Jewish culture and the Yiddish language.

“As time passes, it takes with it the personal memory of personal experience. The result is that we who have not lived through this ordeal must, however unwillingly, become its historians,” said Morgentaler, who is the daughter of abortion-rights crusader Dr. Henry Morgentaler and Yiddish novelist Chana Rosenfarb.

“To be a child of survivors is to have congress with ghosts — to be overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility … an obligation to never let the dead be forgotten (and) to defend their honour, their names, their humanity (and) their valour.”

Another problem with the passing of time, Morgentaler added, is that eventually all knowledge of the Holocaust will come from fictionalized and romanticized books and movies.

“The Holocaust is everywhere today,” she told the audience, mentioning recent movies such as “Defiance,” “The Reader” (also a novel) and “Inglourious Basterds.”

“These movies cash in on a kind of easy emotion that is closer to entertainment than it is to historical reality. They evoke horror and a sentimentalized sense of redemption at the same time, all of it at a comfortable remove from what actually happened,” the Canadian Jewish News reported Morgentaler as saying.

“I am afraid that as time goes by there will be more and more such fictionalizations … cut off from the reality of what actually happened. No one likes unadulterated, unmitigated horror. No one wants to believe that suffering the Jews experienced during the Holocaust has no purpose, that the dead can never be avenged. We want to be able to sleep at night. We want to feel that something good came out of something bad, even if the good is fiction.”

At the end of her speech, Morgentaler recited a poem written by her mother, first in Yiddish, then translated into English, the newspaper said.