It takes me back to a couple of years ago, when I toured Dachau. It's so hard to describe the mix of emotions one feels when approaching an old concentration camp, and it seemed trite to try when I was writing my blog entry about it, so I just kept it casual, which also seemed trite but at least not pandering or patronizing. The truth is that when you're standing in that place, there's nothing, no treatment or response that seems appropriate, nothing that seems respectful other than silence. Neither laughter nor excessive somberness seemed quite right or natural for me, for reasons I'll not try to describe here and now. Standing where it happened, it seemed disgustingly insufficient to say atrocities took place, ignorant or insensitive to speak of the positive way some dealt with it, cold and clinical to speak of the historical aspects of it. It even seemed almost hideous for me to be questioning or analyzing my own emotional reaction because to do so was to distract from and severely disrespect those whose experiences I was merely imagining.
It seems like only one who was there has any right to speak of what it must have been like to be there. Only one who lost their dearest loved ones there has any right to say what the personal impact was or how to deal with such situations. Most experiences in life are like that, I suppose, but with something of this magnitude, I just don't even know what to do with it. The more I try to articulate this, the more inadequate and fumbling it seems. I don't intend to disrespect or offend in doing so, but I recognize that even publishing this just doesn't seem completely appropriate in some ways...but what is?
Some lines from a scene from The Reader came to mind as all of these thoughts flashed through my mind today in response to seeing those photos my friend took. The scene is a conversation between a Jewish woman who survived the camps and a male friend of a former female SS guard who, along with her fellow guards, was tried for leaving many Jews locked in a burning building during evacuation of a camp. Upon her death, the former SS guard leaves money to this Jewish woman, and the male friend has come to deliver the money to her. During the course of the conversation, she says the following to him:
"I'm not sure I can help you, Mr. Berg. Or rather, even if I could I'm not willing to.
...
People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren't therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn't go there to learn. One becomes very clear about these things.
...
What are you asking for? Forgiveness for her? Or do you just want to feel better yourself? My advice, go to the theatre, if you want catharsis. Please. Go to literature. Don't go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing.
...
There's nothing I can do with this money. If I give it to anything associated with the extermination of the Jews, then to me it will seem like absolution and that is something I'm neither willing nor in a position to grant."
Upon entering Dachau, I had a very distinct, clear impression: the magnitude of the evil which shadowed it was beyond my comprehension, and no "lessons" should ever have to be learned in a way even remotely approaching it. I experienced a strange dissonance between my desire to "make it real" and never forget and my desire to respect the dead by not gawking like a tourist at such...sacred?...hallowed?...evil?...haunted?...ground. I thought of having read about the holocaust and "learning lessons" from the experiences I read about, and being there on that ground, it seemed so utterly trifling to even think about "lessons learned". Standing in the camp, imagining the terrible situation and incomprehensible magnitude of the lives affected there, even trying to be sensitive to the shadows of the past and the lives which ended or were permanently scarred, even looking on a sculptural monument to their memory, I couldn't help but question whether I should even be there in the first place, whether anyone not directly connected or affected had any right setting foot there. But then, to forbid it would be to keep it from becoming real to people for whom it might not otherwise.
I do think the camp was respectfully managed, not some sort of voyeuristic tourist trap. And I certainly wouldn't tell people they shouldn't go. I think they should, if only to let the reality of the past sink in for themselves, as much as visiting the shadows can do. I still question my reaction, my dissonance of conscience. But there are no words. There's nothing that's not trite. In order for words not to be hollow and disrespectful, it seems they must be spoken on a historical basis, which has its time and place, but analyzing the historical ramifications and "lessons" of it while standing where it took place seems callous and inhumane, wildly inappropriate in the face of their lives and memories... It's difficult to describe. The only place I've heard similar thoughts expressed is in the movie The History Boys, where two professors (T1 and T2) of differing instruction styles and a group of students (S1-S6) are all sitting together:
T1: I thought we might talk about the Holocaust.
T2: Good gracious! How can you teach the Holocaust?
T1: That would do as a question. Can you, should you, teach the Holocaust? Anybody? Come on.
S1: It has origins, it has consequences. It's a subject like any other.
S2: Not like any other, surely. Not like any other at all.
S1: No, but it's a topic.
T2: They go on school trips there nowadays, don't they? Auschwitz, Dachau. What's always concerned me is where do they have their sandwiches, drink their Cokes?
S3: The visitors' centre. It's like anywhere else.
T2: Yeah, but do they take pictures of each other there? Are they smiling? Do they hold hands? Nothing is appropriate.
S1: What if you were to write this was so far beyond one's experience, silence is the only proper response?
S4: Mr Hector's answer to lots of questions, though, wouldn't it, sir?
T2: Er, yes. Yes, Dakin, it is.
S4: "Whereof one cannot speak,thereof one must be silent." That's right, isn't it, sir? Wittgenstein.
T1: Yes, that's good.
T2: No, it's not good. It's flip, it's glib, it's journalism.
S4: It's you that taught us it.
T2: I didn't teach you. And Wittgenstein did not screw it out of his very guts
(stutters) in order for you to turn it into a dinky formula. Why can't we simply just condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?
S3: There's no point, sir. Everybody will do that. "The camp's an event unlike any other." "The evil unprecedented." Et cetera, et cetera.
T2: No! Can't you see that even to say "et cetera" is... monstrous? "Et cetera" is what the Nazis would have said. The dead reduced to mere verbal abbreviation.
S3: All right, not et cetera. But given that the death camps are generally thought of as unique, wouldn't another approach be to show precedents? Put them, well, in proportion.
S2: Proportion?!
S4: Not proportion, then, but putting them in context.
S5: But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and explained. And if it can be explained, then it can be explained away.
S6: Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.
T1: That's good, Posner.
S5: It isn't good! I mean it, sir.
S4: But when we talk about putting them in context, it's only the same as the dissolution of the monasteries. After all, monasteries had been dissolved before Henry VIII, dozens of them.
S5: Yes, but the difference is I didn't lose any relatives in the dissolution of the monasteries.
T1: Good point.
S2: You keep saying, "good point". Not 'good point', sir. True! To you, th-the Holocaust is just another topic on which we may or may not get a question.
T1: No! No! But this is history. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. And looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground - we don't see it. And because we don't see it, this means there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be. Even on the Holocaust.
(bell rings)
All that said, after my long-winded attempt to explain my thoughts, I'm back to sensing that there are just some things for which...there are no words. They must be experienced to be known, whether or not they are understood. Those things are sacred in their own way.
1 comment:
Agreed.
For the month of February our family book club read Anne Frank, the Diary of a Young Girl. Now that the month is up and comments are welcome, I cannot seem to think of a single necessary or properly encompassing thought to donate to the discussion. Yes, I had earmarked certain passages on which to comment and flush out ideas, but now I find I cannot. Nay, WILL not. And yet, I cannot offend my family by saying nothing. So, I will perhaps begrudgingly type up a few of the most poignant passages and leave them to speak for themselves...
Also, today I visited the blog of a friend who's young daughter died suddenly, unexpectedly, a year and a half ago. She shared how hard a time she is having lately (again...still...always). There was nothing to say to her that she would hear and from which draw comfort. And as I read others' comments to her, they seemed, glib, unfeeling, preachy and/or hollow. I wanted to be able to delete every single one of the cheesey, inappropriate, if-well- meant comments . Surely silence would demonstrate more feeling than resorting to such comments? And yet, if remaining silent would she know I had been there and had so deeply empathized with her? The answer was no. So I, in full self centered hypocrisy, too, wrote something I hoped to be caring without coming across in the infinite ways I have second guessed since having done so. I justified having commented by telling myself I would have wanted to know someone cared rather than not knowing. However, if it comes down to justifications where does that take me, and what point is served? And how would I, not having suffered her experience of loss, have any idea of what an appropriate justification would be in this situation in the first place? I feel a certain fear in how deeply I have surely failed by convincing myself she in any way "needed" or "benefitted from" my words. Her words were spoken to express herself, not so much to invite others to drown her words/feelings out with theirs. >big sigh< My mind is buzzing and buzzing over something it cannot seem to puzzle out even after the fact. And it will continue to do so, like my tongue touches my inner cheek when I've mis-bitten and caused a tender wound I can't help but tongue and test incessantly...
Anyway, thank you for your thoughtful post; timing was freakishly apropos...
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