How the Holocaust Stole the Future

This week, per the  Nov. 1, 2005 United Nations General Assembly Resolution which established Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world honored the memory of Holocaust victims.

All over the world, in ceremonies, commemorations and dedications, the world honored that memory, often with the presence of the dwindling numbers of survivors of the Holocaust who lived to bear witness to the truth of the most horrible visitation of deliberate murder on a group of people ever perpetrated.

We commemorated and  remembered, as did the survivors, those left behind by the loss of so many victims—and all of us in some way or another, who have done our share of making history out of memory.

We have inscribed names on museum walls and holy places. We have told the stories of the camps and the ovens, and detailed and documented the horrors, and counted up the victims, which total six million. We have written books and essays. We have built museums and monuments. We have interviewed survivors and collected names and documents.  We have made art and literature and music out of the experience of the Holocaust by its victims—and its survivors.   We have  examined it as history, as summations of suffering, and made it permanent. We have made it official so that no one—and persons have argued this—can say, “This did not happen, or it happened not so much, or there was another cause, and in any case,  we all bear responsibility, or there were only 500,000″—as if two were not too many.

We have done all of this—wept suddenly at a memorial, in the dark of the night remembered relatives and families who were lost, sometimes in the telling of the tales or seeing an artifact—a mountain of shoes at the Holocaust Museum or an intact railroad car—recoiled at the truth of it.

All of this—the summing up,  the stories, the truth-telling and embracing—is done every year and in many places around the world, especially on this day. Our imagination has not failed us in finding the details of the Holocaust and its crushing meaning.  All of this has been done and must be done.

But we should let our imaginations reach a little further, to a space unoccupied, an absence. In life, when someone dies, it is often said that it was his or her time, as a way of acceptance of the presence of death as a natural thing, ordained and fated.  Even confounding accidents or illnesses or violence are somehow determined into the drama of daily life. But for the six million victims and the rest that were exterminated in the camps, it was NOT their time, it was not natural. They did not fall victim to the indiscriminate, the ailing heart, they did not succumb to age,  they did not just come as we all must to the end of things.   They were robbed of their lives in their time—and it was deliberate, planned and efficient.

History itself was robbed.  We were robbed of those lives, the lives of the six million. Not just their relatives, sons and daughters, parents and grandparents and extended families, but all of us, their communities, their cities, their countries, the world and all its teeming life were robbed.

Their lives were taken, brutally, coldly, but more than that, their life was taken, expunged, made to never happen, never to be lived in its course,  to be a part of life’s cycle of   chances and accidents and rituals and rhythms. Imagine for a moment, the millions upon millions of breaths of air, in and out, in the atmosphere of history, the sighs, the singular laughter, the anxieties, the successes or failures, the nurturing, and the dreams in the night skies of all of them, going forward instead of: stopping where they suffered and died.

Imagine them, young, almost new, old, almost done, and all the things in between we call a life. Imagine the sweet ordinariness not experienced, first learning, first love. They never saw the man on the moon, heard the tempos of modern music, or wrote or sang or performed them, or added to the sum of all things created by men and women. 

Imagine the stuff of our daily lives—the clothes, the shoes, the cars, the roof over our heads, the streets, a bottle of milk or wine,  and the yearning for travel to see the world. Imagine a concert, a book, a wedding, a funeral honored and attended, wisdom shared and passed on, things ignored and embraced: a single kiss, the ocean, a voice speaking with God, the dancers and high jumpers and sleepers joined together.

None of these things happened, nor were the wonders and things we saw and lived a part of their lives.

The Holocaust is about more than remembering the lives of the victims as victims, it is imagining and then remembering them moving forward into the stolen future of their lives.  We are commemorating among all the vastness of history an absence of being, the memory of the loss of the lives they might have and should have lived, however the course. 

If you close your eyes in the night, walking outside, for a second, as you breathe, you might feel the whisper of another breath.