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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...
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…
References
Baron, R.A. & Richardson, D.A. (2004). "Catharsis: does "getting it out of one's system" really help?" Human Aggression.
Miami Holocaust Memorial. Retrieved from http://www.holocaustmmb.org/.
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