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Tuesday, May 10, 2011

An archive of infinite value

Google has done all mankind a signal service by helping to put online the historical resources of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem based centre for remembering the Holocaust.

The work of this kind of research centre grows increasingly more important and valuable every day, as the last survivors die, and as hundreds of millions of children worldwide grow up history-illiterate (or, what is just as bad, unconcerned), and so they can be fed any nonsense, any vile and motivated garbage about what some of our ancestors did to their contemporaries.

Holocaust denial has become a kind of industry in many parts of the world. They say everything from ‘It never happened’, to ‘it was vastly exaggerated’. As if saying that ‘only’ fifty thousand or a hundred thousand Jews were slaughtered like sheep somehow makes the crime less ghastly, less mind-numbing than saying the number was close to six million; or as if saying a few million Jews were ‘only’ thrown out of their jobs and houses and countries, or robbed and beaten and raped and jailed as a national mission-cum-pastime for years together for no crime they had committed except the fact that they were Jews makes the horror less damning, more tolerable. I dare anyone who knows what it means to be human, to be a father/mother, a son/daughter or a husband/wife, and who knows about the Holocaust, to stand up and assert that a) it wouldn’t matter to him/her if it happened to ‘only’ his dearest one, and that b) knowing physics is ‘more important’ than knowing that kind of history, so s/he just doesn’t ‘have time’ for that kind of knowledge.

It didn’t happen to Jews only in Germany or German-occupied territories such as Poland during World War II, by the way. To cite just one instance, the Nazis did the Russians a service of incalculable value by deflecting the world’s attention from the record of the endless pogroms in which heaven knows how many million Jews suffered and died. And there are many countries, if truth be known, which have no right to hold their heads high over their record of treating the Jews, though they might never have descended to downright, cold-blooded mass slaughter.

And it hasn’t happened only to Jews, either. Even if we restrict our attention to the 20th century alone, humans of every description who were unfortunate enough to be hated and weak minorities in the countries where they lived have been humiliated and slaughtered savagely in vast numbers, in all places from south America to the Balkans to Africa, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. No one who has had both the energy and the stomach to go through that history of endless night should dare to say that the 20th century was an era of spectacular and unsullied ‘progress’. No one except the technology-drunk (and also personally unaffected) can make a claim like that.

I carry no brief for what the state of Israel stands for today, nor have any wish to defend it if in their historical turn the Jews have turned oppressors in some places (about which, though, there can be more than one opinion). But using Holocaust denial to bash the Israel of today is not just ignorant and silly, it is diabolical. And the same goes for all those elsewhere on earth who want to forget or deny what their forefathers did because it makes them ashamed to call themselves human beings.

Keep up the good work, Yad Vashem. Your kind of work is of ever-increasing necessity. I can vouch for the ignorance and unconcern of only a very tiny section of the human population – to wit, teenagers who are studying in my town for the secondary board examination and have to read about the Holocaust as part of a short chapter on the Second World War in history – and I know just how clueless they are, all of them. If I can get even a handful of them to click on the links provided here (and I am not very hopeful) I shall consider that I have been doing my job well.

[You can go to their photo archive and take a look for yourself.]

15 comments:

Rajdeep said...

A good effort in an age where speaking only "positive" things is the trend. I call it sweeping the dust under the carpet. The dust remains and hence does not prove any sort of cleanliness.
Criticizing never helps but the way blatant inequalities are being forced even in todays world in various ways, I do feel it is important to turn to even the horrible chapters of history. Easier said than done and leaves me confused as to what is correct...

Rajdeep said...

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."
Albert Einstein.

Krishanu Sadhu said...

Sir ,
A friend of mine visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel a couple of years ago and narrated to me his experiences there . Thereafter I did some web-surfing and among others , came across this footage from National Archives and Records Administration , USA .
http://www.archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.43452

It is very graphic and disturbing , and after watching this I was partly enraged but mostly ashamed on learning how some people had inflicted such atrocities on human beings on such a massive scale. It is a real pity that such horrible nightmares from history keep on haunting us in different forms at different places across the world time and again.

Regards,
Krishanu Sadhu

Rajarshi said...

Dear Sir,

I visited Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam around 2 years back. And my mind started drawing parallels with India. The holocaust history has been quite thoughtfully preserved for most of its past whether it be concentration camps of Auschwitz or Belsen or the numerous museums of Western Europe. But if you look at the genocides committed in Indian Sub-continent, say partition or progroms like 1984 anti-Sikh riots or 2002 post-Godhra massacres, there are hardly any memorials, any preservation of history (apart from a plethora of books, again most of them written by Westerners). In Anne Frank house, there were German visitors as well but nobody says that preserving holocaust history hurts their sentiments. However in India, we have a singular lack of ability to step back and reflect on the darker sides of our past. Worse still, any attempts of preserving such history may get bogged down by narrow ideas of 'hurting religious sensitivities' and associated parochialism. As Yad Vashem website says, these are the things that should never be forgotten. As Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank (the only survivor in the family) had said, "You can't build the future without knowing the past."

Thanks a lot for sharing the Yad Vashem link.

Suvro Chatterjee said...

Thanks for commenting, Rajarshi, but I'd like to know which Rajarshi you are: I know so many!

Notice that you are as of now the first and only one to comment on this blogpost. That alone speaks volumes for what sort of nation we are (given that all my several hundred regular readers are highly educated people); utterly uninterested in matters historical (and in fact far more obsessed with myths and legends). So what else can we expect? Let's face it: we are not even seriously interested in science; all we want is quick shortcuts to jobs and a lifetime of idling, gossip and shopping.

Krishanu Sadhu said...

Sir ,
The last time I visited , there were three comments , including one of mine. Now I find them missing . Is there a problem with blogspot.com?

Regards ,
Krishanu Sadhu

Suvro Chatterjee said...

Yes, I'm terribly sorry about that, Krishanu, though it's not my fault. Something was wrong with blogger over these last few days, so many old comments vanished. They promised to restore everything after the maintenance work was over, but obviously they haven't managed to do a perfect job! Anyway, I shall be glad to have comments from you again, if you want to take the trouble.
Sir

Shilpi said...

Thank you for the link/s. Visited the link and spent awhile there, and I've been thinking about this post of yours.

I didn't know till I came here that there were people representing organizations and institutions who denied that the holocaust had ever happened. Some people go far enough to say that there were work camps designed to 'protect' the Jews. Now using that argument some 80 years ago might have seemed almost believable but it's evil to think that people forward such lies and others are willing to believe in the same. And I remember reading somewhere that the US soldiers had been given strict instructions to take pictures of the concentration camps and the gas chambers - no matter how those pictures might horrify people around the world and later...because somebody had been farsighted enough to know that people in respectable places would deny that the holocaust had ever happened...

I sometimes wonder though: for the people who have read some or know some - that's one thing. They cannot but have nightmares and say that it's important to know and remember and never to forget but then there's that bit that you mention: about such things having happened over and over and they are still happening. Don't we humans ever really learn or don't we care?

I can't clearly remember a point in time when I didn't know about the holocaust and so I'm assuming that I watched a program about it on TV when I was 6 or 7 or thereabouts...and we grew up in the time when the media made the term 'ethnic cleansing' something of an established term while reporting on Yugoslavia. I don't understand though: how is it possible that people get to be in high-school without knowing anything about the holocaust of all things. And I, amongst all my friends, wasn't even particularly well-read or aware of current affairs. Maybe some of your students will visit the link though.

Shilpi said...

I don't know whether I should comment on Rajarshi's comments but a couple of odd thoughts crossed my mind even though I seem to broadly agree with his comment.

I can't rattle out an entire list of books just now (I could though after asking a friend) but I think there are good books (both fiction and non-fiction) written by non-westerners as well on those massacres in India (a couple that loom up in my mind are by Bapsi Sidhwa and Khushwant Singh)...and I honestly think that one terribly important way that some history gets preserved is through books (whether by westerners or non-westerners as long as they want to get to the truth as best as possible and not write imaginary tales while claiming to present history...). That some of us don't read enough and that there aren't libraries that make the books widely available and that they don't hit the best-seller lists are other matters among others.

And why wouldn't there be German visitors to Anne Frank's house?...It can hardly be the case that every single German now believes that preserving the memory of the holocaust can be a bad idea or a good one...it's more of a national sentiment that is expressed. That's where I think we fail very often...

Suvro Chatterjee said...

Krishanu,

I hope you will be happy to see that your earlier comment is back here once more.

sayantika said...

Dear Sir,
Thanks for sharing the link.
I am reading the history of holocaust from the links (this time, just for the sake of knowing), which as you rightly said, was just a part of The Second World War chapter.
I had another chance though, during the pass course classes of college, which however, did not happen most of the time because both students and teachers were not interested in going for pass classes. Still, better late than never.
And genocides in different places of the world has indeed, shown how remarkable our progress is. One is moved by sheer horror at these events. And even those who are more interested in physics should know how one of the greatest physicists, Albert Einstein, was forced to emigrate to America, since Jews were barred from teaching in German universities and Einstein was even named in the assassination list.
Thanks once more for the history lesson.

With regards,
Sayantika.

Rajarshi said...

@Suvro sir,
I personally don't know you. I am just an admirer of your writings & ideas.

@Shilpi,
Yes, there are books on darker sides of Indian history written by South Asians. In fact, I recently read 'The Other Side of Silence' by Urvashi Butalia which essentially deals with how Partition affected women & children. What I meant in my comment & what Butalia also mentions in her book is that there are hardly any physical memorials, museums to this one event which had such far-reaching consequences for the future of the sub-continent. The history in our school textbooks abruptly ends on 15th Aug 1947 (at least that's the way it used to be in my days i.e. mid nineties), as if history of post-independent India is work-in-progress. Probably, kids from two generations from now will grow up completely ignorant of the fact that such a massive human migration ever happened with such a grotesque aftermath. Again, on the point of books on Partition, most of the well-known ones deal with Partition on western side i.e. Punjab. To the best of my knowledge neither Bapsi Sidhwa nor Khushwant Singh deal with what happened in Bengal. What we have is mostly works of fiction, cinemas like Ghatak's 'Meghe Dhaka Tara'.

Suvro Chatterjee said...

You are right, Rajarshi: I too think the trauma of the partition in the east has been less written about. There are a few good books, though: in fact I reviewed a recent one (in Bangla) on this blog some time ago. It's called Aagun Pakhi. You can search for it by name.

Shilpi said...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/opinion/lessons_from_history.shtml

This is not a bad read on the whole and I think it might be relevant for this post. It goes beyond forced sterilization and the abortion debate and speaks of the dark shared histories of nations, of federally sanctioned scientific research, of Public Health service clinical trials, of morally 'upright' doctors who no doubt believed in the principle of 'do no harm', of people belonging to the wrong social category, and of poor people and of children even who have no way to defend themselves, and of the need not to forget...

That specific research study (The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment) is one of the rare bits of ethics that even introductory sociology text-books in the US talk about, and it's just one of the reasons (one can go through a dark list of the history of scientific experiments in the US) that Institutional Review Boards were set up in the first place to make sure that scientists and yes indeed, doctors didn't trample all over people by getting them to 'participate' in medical trial runs of drugs and other invasive medical tests and much more, at least in institutions which received federal funding (there are still ways to go around the hoops and those Review Boards do make things very difficult even for a regular study - but I won't get into all that). It makes one wonder does it not: if a majority of scientists, social scientists and doctors were such morally upright people and did not engage in harm why was there the nationally felt need to set up Review Boards, and only to make sure that human beings weren't being treated like guinea pigs? And so should we now believe that a majority of scientists, social scientists and doctors have become completely white and pure and careful and conscientious (and not just related to this very primary bit of ethics in that we don't treat human beings like guinea pigs...)?

For the other bit: Hitler had been fascinated by the idea of 'eugenics' as forwarded in the US, and he had mentioned that while the Americans had come up with the right idea regarding racial purity they were 'too soft' to take it to the heights that it should be...and many of the scientists and doctors at the Nuremberg Trials actually forwarded the excuse that they had been inspired by US scientists and doctors in the first place...

Vaishnavi said...

Dear Sir,

Thanks a lot for the Yad Vesham links. To grow up in an age and in surroundings where we have never had to question for our safety, for our right to live is a blessing indeed but to grow up unaware and apathetic to one of the biggest incidents of mass genocide is a crime. Yad Vesham and you Sir, in writing a post about it have done a wonderful thing.I wonder how cavalier people would be about all this if they were to read books like Children of War. It is emerging that the killer responsible for the recent spate of violence in has neo nazi leanings, what might your take be on that Sir?

Regards,
Vaishnavi

Regards,
Vaishnavi