Holocaust Memorial How Is it That We

Holocaust Memorial

How Is it That We Should Remember?

Sometimes the only thing that we can do to help remedy a terrible wrong is to serve as witnesses. And if we cannot be actual witnesses, then we struggle to find some way to serve the same function in a different way, very often by visiting a memorial to what has happened. If we cannot have been there ourselves, then we can travel there -- wherever that there is -- in spirit and in our hearts we can help ensure that the world does not forget. One of those events that many people seek to ensure such a remembrance of by visiting memorials is the Holocaust. There are memorials to the millions who were slaughtered by Nazi Germany -- mostly Jews, but also others like Gypsies and the disabled -- all over the world, even in places that are far away from where the actual killings occurred. But such events, in which so much innocent blood was spilled, spread their tentacles out across the world until there is no one, no square inch, that is not affected.

Memorials serve different functions. They allow people to serve as ongoing witnesses, as noted above. They also help people achieve a certain degree of catharsis. Catharsis is a concept that comes originally from Greek concepts of drama and art and refer to the cleansing or purification that the individual can feel when she or he comes into contact with a tragedy or other great work of art that allows the person to understand some terrible truth about the human condition. A person can confront death, for example, within the context of a play (or a painting, poem, or ode) and so come to a greater understanding of what something terrible means, even when that person has not undergone the experience himself or herself. This is the classical meaning of the word.

In modern usage, the word took on a somewhat different meaning. Sigmund Freud, who developed the practice of psychoanalysis, believed that people often refused to deal with the strong emotions that arose around the most frightening or traumatic events that the person had gone through. Until the person dealt with these emotions, she or he would be haunted by them and could never truly recover from them. But once they allowed themselves to experience the emotions, then they could get over the effect of such experiences on them (Baron & Richardson, 2004).

None of us in this class, of course, have experienced the Holocaust personally and so we cannot experience the kind of personal catharsis described above. Our catharsis when we see a Holocaust memorial is more like the experience that the Greek writers talked about: We come to experience and understand some terrible experience through an encounter with a representation of it and this allows us to experience a diluted version of it. To be effective, a memorial cannot be too diluted. Otherwise it would be like an overly weak vaccination: It would not expose us to enough of the event and the appropriate emotions to allow our psyches to recognize it when we met it again.

Many memorials -- like the one to the dead of the war in Vietnam that is in Washington D.C. -- are abstract, or nearly so. The empty chairs that mark the dead of the Oklahoma City bombing are the merest suggestion of actual human lives. These memorials call to mind the dead by the fact that they are not portrayed. It is their absence that is meant to speak to us. It is what the artist has not included that is meant to speak most loudly.

And this approach can be very effective. However, as terrible as was the loss of American life in Vietnam or the slaughter of innocents in Oklahoma City, these were smaller events than was the Holocaust. We can imagine what they were like. The Holocaust was so vast in its killing that even when we read about it, even when we read the accounts of those who were themselves witnesses and survivors, we cannot quite hold it in our minds. It is all too much. This is why for a tragedy of such a size, it can be better to have a memorial that is less abstract.