what Holocaust fatigue?

“Overexposure” to the Holocaust was starting to annoy people at the close of the 20th century, as noted by Michael Blumenthal in an essay in Time magazine in February 2000.

Several weeks ago, at the home of some new acquaintances in Berlin, a kind and amiable family who had invited us over for Sunday dinner, there arose the subject of their adolescent son’s and his schoolmates’ “Holocaust fatigue”–their sense of having the Holocaust perpetually rammed down their throats by teachers and administrators at every turn. He was tired, the son said, of hearing so much about the Holocaust, a period in Germany’s history during which he was not even alive, and for which, by definition, he and his generation could shoulder no responsibility.

I commiserated with him, saying that I could understand his plight–one shared, in fact, by many Americans who feel they bear no blame for the historical fact of slavery or for the unforgivable mistreatment and displacement of Native Americans.

Blumenthal went on to note that this “fatigue” was unaccompanied by much knowledge about the Holocaust (in Germany, at least) fifty-five years after the event. But so it goes with history: human beings forget bad things—even things as bad as the Holocaust. They choose to forget, in order to be able to move forward, to go on with their lives. Life goes on. It must, and it should. 

The sacralizing of the Holocaust (”Never forget,” the warning passed on from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who couldn’t forget—and shouldn’t, of course, have been expected to) was directed at American Jews: perpetual naifs lucky enough to have been born into the many bounties of American-style freedom.

I am not one of them: not naive, and was not born into the many bounties of American-style freedom (which makes me treasure it all the more, I daresay). I am all too familiar with the persecution of Jews that continued apace in Europe immediately after the Holocaust, persecution about which neither the perpetrators nor the victims were sentimental: by the time the second round was over, both parties understood that it was the eternal fate of the Jews to suffer persecution, whether of the extermination kind under Nazism or of the show-trial kind under Stalinism.

So I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t get all worked up over Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust “conference.” I’ll let my naive American friends writhe in pain over it. Let them learn: the Holocaust did not end the historical persecution of the Jews. It was just one milestone.

Am I cold-blooded and cold-hearted enough for you? Blame anti-Semitism (not the name-calling kind—the rounding-up and exterminating kind). It made me, a non-believer from a long line of non-believers, into a realist, and an unashamed, unembarrassed, forthright defender of the Jews. And this cold-hearted, cold-blooded bitch is telling you that it is the Palestinians, not the Israelis or the Jews, who will suffer most from Ahmadinejad’s insanity.

The Times (London) agrees with me.

For it is not simply that the denial or playing down of the Holocaust will, as Amos Oz, the liberal Israeli writer, said, “be received with revulsion and disgust everywhere in the world”; it makes the terrible mistake of justifying criticism of Israel by denying the historical fact so crucial to the state’s founding. The more thoughtful Palestinians have already understood that the refusal to acknowledge the wartime persecution of the Jews gives credibility to the assertion that critics of Israel are motivated by anti-Semitism. Iran’s President simply proves the point. He has labelled Israel a “tumour” that should be “wiped from the face of the Earth”.

Mr Mottaki has revealed the real intention. “If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt”. With such crass statements from their supporters, the Palestinians must worry that their case will never be understood. In fact, the truth or otherwise of the Holocaust is of no concern to Iranian hardliners. They are using the issue because of its emotive value — in Israel, Europe and especially in the US. Nor is the timing coincidental. The hardliners are determined to rally domestic support for their defiance on the nuclear issue and to sabotage any dialogue with America on Iraq. What better way to achieve isolation than to deny one of the most shameful events in Western history?