Forgetting to Remember

'For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.' - Elie Wiesel

'Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.' - Jean Baudrillard

It’s a common incantation that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it (George Santayana, 1906); it comes out with the familiar litany of prosaic quotes to mark historic anniversaries and commemorations, it prefaces innumerable texts, and it serves as an effective justification for any historical analysis. I’ve even written it on the inside cover of my dissertation notebook. And yet, whilst we remember this incantation, do we always remember to remember the past?

Tomorrow, January 27 2017, marks international Holocaust Memorial Day: a day completely and totally dedicated to remembering the Holocaust, to remembering not to forget it.

Iconic scene from Spielberg's (1993) 'Schindler's List'. Source: photo by Allstar/Cinetext/Universal - © Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar from Imdb.com

I’ve struggled with the idea of having a defined temporal bracket set aside for the purpose of memorial for a while, traceable, I think, to when I sat cross-legged on the floor of a classroom, listening to my primary-school teacher translating the news of some bombings in London and asking us all to be quiet for a minute to remember the victims. Amidst several other fidgeting, cross-legged kids, I scrunched my eyes together and tried to will myself into remembering. Every few seconds I’d soften the scrunch in one eye to a split vision, quickly checking that everyone else was still remembering. I’d then resume my scrunch and focus on my own remembering. I don’t think I ever thought about the victims for more than a few negligible seconds; what really occupied my minute of remembering were tangential thought processes about the act of remembering, about why on earth I was being told to sit in silence and remember something that no one I knew had experienced and I certainly hadn’t experienced, or about what other people were thinking about and, oh dear! I wasn’t actually remembering what I was supposed to remember! I kept forgetting to remember it! I’ve observed countless minutes of silence since my cross-legged, scrunched-eyes experience, and I always find myself coming back to this circular questioning of performing commemoration of particular memories within a defined, imposed minute of silence – or, by extension, a universally dedicated day.

From the outset, I want to be clear that I do not dispute the dedication of minutes of silence or days of dedicated memorial to remembering particular events/victims. What I seek to question is the everyday alternative – are, the everyday alternatives, I should say – to these normalised forms of ritualised commemoration.

Around the same time as the recounted minute of silence, I was obsessed with a series of self-musealisation books styled around the concept of ‘My Story’. They had everything: ‘My Story: Blitz’, ‘My Story: Pompeii’, ‘My Story: Slave Girl’, etc. Published by Scholastic UK, these historical children’s novels are each written in the form of a diary of a fictional young woman or man living during an important event in history. They narrate the historical event from an explicitly individuated, situated perspective, engaging you with it through the construed story rather than reproducing historical truth in the objective manner of factual listings and rigid analyses. I felt like I was talking to someone who had experienced the event, or even, sometimes, experiencing the event myself. It was a natural progression to ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and, from there, to a host of other narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, in historical literature. As another common incantation goes, a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, whilst the man who never reads lives only once (George R.R. Martin, 2011); it was time-travel throughout history and across geography for a girl stuck in the middle of Watford with a funny South African tinge to her accent. But ultimately, it was through such narratives that I became exposed to and was able to explore historical events and realities (if somewhat trivialised) that I otherwise would never have encountered or, more often, that my memory would have dismissed and eventually forgotten.      

I don’t remember when I first encountered the Holocaust specifically. Contingent with my love of reading, I get the sense that it’s always been there in my periphery, gradually and progressively brought into focus by my habitual and often arrogant reading habits. What I do remember, however, is when my friend first encountered the Holocaust. My friend, who I’m going to keep anonymous, comes from a Jewish background, is a year older than I, and had never heard of the Holocaust until I mentioned one day, aged around 16, that I was reading ‘If This Is A Man’ by Primo Levi. ‘What’s that about?’ she asked. I naturally replied that it was a testimony from the Holocaust, thinking that was a normative grounding for the context of the book. ‘The Holocaust?’ she asked, ‘What’s that?’

I didn’t explain the Holocaust to her, but asked her to pose the same question to her parents when she got home, recommending Spielberg’s (1993) ‘Schindler’s List’ if she wanted to explore it more independently. She came back to me a week later having watched the film, totally dubious as to how she had never encountered such a significant event of the recent past, still a living memory for many of the older generations alive today, or indeed speculative of why she had never encountered such a significant event. I directed her to several other film and narrative (re)productions of the Holocaust, myself, having normatively assumed conscious global awareness of the Holocaust, aghast and genuinely concerned at her lack of previous encounter with it.

I went to a high school where Holocaust education formed a consciously prominent and normatively diverse part of student life and development, directed and encouraged by my head teacher, Dame Helen Hyde, a fellow in Holocaust studies at the Imperial War Museum, member of the chair of education committee for the National Holocaust Commission, and recipient of a DBE for services to national and Holocaust education. In 2013, I spent a week with Dame Hyde and a group of girls from my school tracing the spatiality of the Holocaust from the Nazi regime in Berlin, Germany, where we visited several memorial sites, to the Wannsee villa, where the Final Solution is said to have been conceived in the Wannsee Conference, to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, Poland and, finally, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps. Comforting me as we walked back towards the coach from visiting Auschwitz-II Birkenau, the RS teacher who had also accompanied us on this trip turned to me and suggested that perhaps the reason why I was so affected by the visit, more visibly and particularly so than many of the other girls, was because I had studied neither History nor Religious Studies and therefore wasn’t used to the images or reality of the Holocaust as the other girls who, on the whole, had studied such subjects at school. “Actually, why did you come on this trip?’ she then asked.

It’s these two questions that I come back to as I continue to read about and explore the Holocaust, and which ultimately form the backbone to my motivation and interest in analysing memorials, memories and commemoration of the Holocaust for my undergraduate dissertation: ‘What is the Holocaust? Why have I never encountered this before?’ and ‘Why did you come on this trip?’ A number of events have been ongoing throughout Cambridge this week to mark Holocaust Memorial day, and the film production of Deborah Lipstadt’s libel case with prominent Holocaust denier David Irving, ‘Denial’, is released across cinema’s tomorrow; but you have to be on the right mailing lists or intentionally search for the events to know about them, and, whilst I’ve had ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ and ‘Denial release date’ pencilled into my diary since I bought it, and though commemorative reminders have implicitly coloured this week in several radio stations and news outlets, especially now on the eve of the event, reminding us not to forget to remember, it’s not a date etched into the conscious memory or everyday performance of most – particularly those of us to whom it is only a post-memory, inherited, encountered, translated to. The deliberate and defined temporal bracket of a day dedicated to remembering the Holocaust is important for this very unconscious reason of reminding us not to forget. But what has formed the backbone to my understandings and awareness of the Holocaust, as I hope to have shown in the narrative of my memories and encounters with it, has ultimately been literature, and, by extension, film.

As we grow ever more temporally removed from the events of the Holocaust and those to whom it forms a lived memory become fewer and fewer, particularly in contexts like my own where temporal remove is reinforced by a lack of spatial proximity to the urban landscape(s) of its perpetration and direct experience, our connections to the past are mediated increasingly not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation. To account for this, post-memory – contextually defined as the adoption of Holocaust memory by individuals and groups whose relation to the event of the Holocaust is nothing more or less than a construction (Martin Modlinger, 2015) – has been engaged in a fictional turn, such that the collective memory of the Holocaust refers to an increasingly fictional archive. As such, mediums like film and literature can effectively and ontologically be theorised and understood as memorials in and of themselves: ‘Schindler’s List’, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, ‘Sophie’s Choice’, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’, ‘The Reader’, ‘Sarah’s Key’, ‘The Book Thief’, and so many others offer a multitude of narratives of the Holocaust, promoting its commemorative performance in a way that is neither spatially nor temporally restricted, as are defined temporal brackets of dedicated commemoration and archetypal memorials to historic events, and, hence, constituting and promoting a significantly more everyday performance of Holocaust memory.

My hope is that the specifically dedicated temporal bracket of January 27 as Holocaust Memorial Day will assist in reminding us not to forget, and perform commemoration in a way that leaves no child sat cross-legged with scrunched-eyes unaware of what she is supposed to be remembering and hence performing somewhat useless commemoration, that answers the subconscious questions those who have yet to encounter the Holocaust inevitably hold, and that incites an interest or at least awareness beyond the boundaries of formal education. But I hold to the cruciality and significance of everyday alternatives, both spatially and temporally, which, in both my personal experience and increasingly supported by evidence across studies of memory and commemoration in the social sciences, are performed effectively by narratives in literature and film and ultimately support the significance of such a dedicated day. Without such support, memories and commemorative understandings of the Holocaust risk being reductionist in their spatial and temporal consignment, implicitly normalising the events with performative closure as something that happened long ago and has been dealt with, serving a very acutely defined sense of memory and commemoration.