The Call of Memory

On a spring day five years ago, I stood inside the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and prayed. I sought fervently to believe that what appeared so heartbreakingly before me was an illusion. That it could not have happened so transparently. I imagined the world from inside a German cattle car, which, only 65 years prior, served to actualize Hitler’s genocidal ambitions by carrying tens of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers.

I promised the six million souls looking down on me that I’d always remember them. But I have since, intermittently, found myself contemplating the ramifications of that commitment. What exactly are the responsibilities of the rememberer? Is he to sing? To safeguard? To study? Perhaps simply to know — to be aware of the horrors that once besieged European Jewry?

Too often, in the weeks leading up to Holocaust Remembrance Day, we forget how to remember. The lessons that emerge from the Holocaust, though all rooted in tremendous gravity, are not all centered around pain and suffering. Anecdotally, as well as in diaries, journal and survivor testimonies, we bear witness to stories of profound decency in unthinkable conditions.

We draw strength from the arresting bravery of some 400 ghetto fighters who mounted a rebellion in Warsaw on the eve of Passover, 1943, with just a few automatic weapons. We learn of the poet Paul Célan, who translated William Shakespeare’s sonnets while imprisoned in Romania. We turn our gaze to the pervasive stream of paintings, drawings, music and writing that were left behind in the camps.

In the eyes of scholar John Felstiner, creative resistance is “more human than blowing up a train, because of everything it takes to make a piece of art or a poem. The personhood is what the Nazis were trying to destroy, to try to erase from the globe.” The rememberer, in my mind, exists primarily to champion the victory of personhood. To emulate the daring pronouncement so many victims made — that they were, albeit in bleak and deplorable circumstances, alive and breathing. He exists to assert the legacy of the victims as impenetrable and lasting.

But why? We need to pay tribute to these courageous individuals because, in many ways, they show us how to live, and how to remember; that to remember is to live, and that we have a choice now — as they did then — to maintain our humanity in a cry of tolerance against fascism, or to remain reticent, apathetic and uninvolved.

In reflecting on the future of memory, Hedi Fried, survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and founder of the Stockholm Storytelling Project, says it is especially important for the younger generation to learn her story, one that is hard enough for her, who experienced it directly, to understand. But she begs us to remember another imperative: namely, that “democracy dies if you don’t work for it.” It crumbles, much as it did across this century of blood and loss — in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia and now in Darfur, where genocide still rages.

We are not helpless, but we are also not as helpful as we could be. We, at this historic crossroads, have a unique responsibility to validate the lessons of the past. At this juncture between life and death, between what we can see and what remains to be seen, passive commemoration does not suffice. It cannot. If we are to build a world centered on dignity, tolerance, and respect for the Other, we have to make it such. Holocaust Remembrance Day lasts for 24 hours. Yet the realities of the Holocaust are eternal. They require us to be constantly cognizant and vigorously vigilant.


Many today still do not taste the liberties a young Sophie Scholl once dreamed of when she left the word “Freedom” on a scrap of paper before being led to her execution. There are still dictatorships impinging on people’s basic human rights; there are still maligning grips of revisionism — those which seek to distort, deflect, twist and undermine our collective consciousness. There are still violent expressions of racism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism.

In some ways, none of us are really free — not until we have risen to the challenge that memory has bestowed upon our generation. For the world shakes as I write; it erupts with uncertainty and flings to the fore a barrage of recurrent tensions and chaos.

Our only hope lies in remembering how to remember.

Remembering Tuscon

And what is the best time for remembering? At noon
when shadows are hidden beneath our feet, or at twilight
when shadows lengthen like longings
that have no beginning, no end, like God?
-Yehuda Amichai, Who Will Remember the Rememberers?

Tragedy often numbs us. It numbed me on January 8. How could this happen?

A bullet. Thirty-one bullets. Six lifeless, nineteen injured. A nation devastated. A brave congresswoman fighting for her life. Making strides that leave the doctors speechless. We are wise to acknowledge miracles, they say. Yes, you are.

I tried to enter the mind of Jared Loughner, but failed. I wanted to understand, but I could not. Instead, I found solace in the stories of heroism: a judge who shielded a staffer from imminent death; a mother who dove in front of her daughter; everyday Americans who wrestled to the ground a deranged gunman and impeded his attempt to reload with an extended magazine—men and women who, when the stakes were highest, sacrificed their lives for their fellow citizens. These are heroes, I thought.

But some were beyond their reach. Some had died. And families and friends were called upon to mourn the senseless passing of the victims. But how does one mourn? And for what purpose? When President Obama addressed the nation a few days after the shootings, he put stories to the faces, to the names, to the ages. He attempted, with his words, to remember the victims for what they represent in the lives of us all. But what especially struck me as key was the connection he made between memory and action: beyond our reflections, Obama contended, our conduct must subscribe to the victims' legacies.

Does it? And what, after all, are the obligations of those left behind? Many understand the concept of commemoration as honoring the legacy of the dead. Have we done that? And if we haven’t, how do we?

Remembering Tuscon must ultimately be a difficult undertaking. Memory, by nature, binds the past and the present. Memory is a recollection; the thrust of a moment, a person, a feeling, into one’s mind. The task and challenge becomes carrying memory into the future. It begins by transcending what we know and assuming what we must.

To me, the only way to keep the victims of the Tuscon tragedy alive is to live in the way that they would have. While meritorious, reciting psalms does not constitute due service. It’s not enough to gather under the roof of a basketball arena one winter evening. It’s not enough to visit a make-shift memorial. Or to write on a Facebook page. Or to cry.

Perhaps the first step is to imagine. Perhaps the first step, as many have well done, is to tell the stories—to humanize the victims and the values for which they stood. But beyond that, commemoration must be constant and forever. It must reconcile the loss, embrace it, and then internalize it. And once it has been internalized, it must be transformed. Into kindness, into respect, into civility—into what a Jared Loughner tried incomprehensibly to take away on that heartbreaking Saturday morning. That, we must redeem.

In the end, memory calls upon our conscience. To act. Not out of remorse, but out of determination. To undo. Not our ethical temperaments, but our ethical lapses.

In the end, memory calls upon our image of a nine year old Christina Taylor Green. The youngest of the Tuscon victims, she had just been elected to the student council at her elementary school and had gone to visit Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to learn more about the political process. A dancer and a swimmer, she represents, most unbearably, pain at its sharpest. But she also represents the imperative at its highest. For her, we must live—we must live in the way that she would have.

So do it for Christina Taylor Green: blossom. Bloom. Rent a yacht and do the things you always wished to do out at sea but never had a chance.

Stop.
Breathe.
Dance.
Swim.
Run for student council.

Dream.

Christina: I hope that we, in our small way, in the hallways and classrooms and streets of our country, find your courage. That we aspire like you, and push bounds like you. That we are never afraid to follow our hearts like you. And that we smile because you were, and because you are, and because you will be.

If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina, I hope you’re jumping in them now.


This post is dedicated to the victims of the Tuscon shooting tragedy of January 11, 2011. May they rest in peace.