Holocaust - Assignment of Meanings

I wrote this piece while attending a "Literature of the Holocaust" course last semester. While the following article specifically addresses the Holocaust - the primary theme I was attempting to get at was the assignment of meaning. We, as a western culture, incessantly seek meaning in every circumstance that arises on the planet. Whether the circumstance be a natural disaster or a social crisis - there is certainly no dearth of voices assigning meaning to it.

Some have argued that the Holocaust is evidence that history is not progressive - directional. This argument holds that at the end of the day history amounts to nothing more than a series of events that show no real progression regarding humanity. The most we can point at is a cumulative body of scientific knowledge demonstrating progress.

This is an important consideration as we generally assign meaning to the events of our life based on previous experiences (history). If history itself carries no inherent meaning - where does that leave us?

The other thought worth evaluating is that we really cannot assign meaning outside of our own experience - said differently - we are unavoidably influenced by our own perspective - what other perspective is available to us? We can certainly agree with other perspectives - but in agreeing with them we adopt them as our own - we accept that particular meaning. Meanings that don't match our values, social structure or personal understanding of the world are not accepted.

Events are not symbols of some deeper meaning, generally. They may be symptomatic of unseen or ulterior influences - but often the event carries its meaning with it inherently. This position makes most people uncomfortable - as we cannot face any unfolding event without categorizing it and assigning it a meaning that fits our understanding of life.

This, I hold, is a mistake. If we were truly that adept at seeing and utilizing meaning - by this point in our history as humanity - we would have figured out how to avoid the social events that lead to us casting about for meaning. My point is that we wouldn't know the true meaning of anything if it smacked us in the face.

There is a caveat, and a little further discussion, regarding that last assertion. Regligous doctrine does assign meaning - historically, in the "now", and for the future. There certainly are spiritual truths that defy secondary interpretation. The difficulty for us is that we are not granted the "full picture" if you will. Omniscience is a divine trait, one that we are clearly not imbued with. The caveat is, that as much as our religious doctrine (whatever persuasion you may happen to be) assures us that there is a plan - and we have sacred documents that hold those truths - the immense effort of abstration required to bring about an accurate account of meaning related to wordly events based on those doctrines would require that we be omniscient. In the religious environment, an attempt to discern the will of God in unfolding events is, at a minimum, hubris and at worst - a masked desire to be God. No living human being I know of has that degree of predictive ability - hence the absolute meaning of the vagaries of life escape us as well - and we are left to our own devices as to assess the true meaning of the events of our life and the lives of those that share the planet with us.

Memories, Meanings and Mourning

Silence may very well be the most appropriate response in considering the nameless horror of the Holocaust. Confronted with an unrestrained, mechanized brutality unleashed on a specific race, a brutality never before encountered in human history – in fact, a ferocity only achievable by the technology of the time – what are we to say? What language, what philosophy, could possibly be employed to organize and make sense of the senseless? What meanings can attach to the methodical murder of six million Jews and millions of other dispossessed people? In one sense, to attempt to discern a meaning, or meanings, within the Holocaust is to risk re-victimizing the victims. When an individual is treated as a contingent means to an end, an injustice has been perpetrated. If in the search for meaning we, however unintentionally, view the testimonies of the survivors as a means from which we can extract a larger meaning, we, too, have perpetrated an injustice.

In 1983, Vera Laska made the following observation, “I see not much use philosophizing, interpreting or engaging in metaphysical speculations over the Holocaust. Such exercises limit the scope of communication to a select few. (That is also why I switched from studying philosophy to the study of history.) What IS needed is the propagation of the stark truth, for facts are the clearest and most comprehensible carriers of the message, understood by all.” If I understand Laska correctly, it is a very dangerous business indeed to translate facts into secondary philosophical, systematic interpretations. For, as always, we risk losing the substance of the facts within the translation – eventually losing authentic contact with the very event that drew our attention in the first place. Is a silent witness to the facts the only role we have then?

Humanity, though, is not silent, regardless of the magnitude of the atrocity. From a philosophical perspective – maybe there is nothing of value to be said about the Holocaust. But, as Laska suggests about philosophy – so what? What we do have are factual accounts, rendered by survivors, of practically every facet of the Holocaust from beginning to end. These witnesses to humanity’s darkest hour have bequeathed to us, both verbally and in writing, their memories. These are indeed the stark facts that are comprehensible to all. In this sense, it is not left to us to find meaning, but to be the faithful archivists of memories.
We, living in a twenty-first century liberal democracy, have little basis to assert, “But we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.” We cannot own this insight to the degree that Primo Levi owned it in the face of the dehumanizing torture he endured at Auschwitz. In context, his memory of that place gives weight to the innate dignity of man – the irreducible human spirit faced with incomprehensible suffering. In context, his memory is a stark fact defying secondary historical, philosophical or metaphysical interpretation. It stands on its own; we are left to evaluate ourselves against his memory – not to evaluate his memory against our current reality.

I am so grateful that the curriculum of this course focused solely on the accounts of the survivors. There are countless intellectual volumes in print regarding the historical preface to Fascism, countless philosophical and psychological accounts of the how and why of it, and countless depictions of the continuing angst of the metaphysical questions concerning God’s presence or lack thereof, all in relation to the Holocaust. While these treatises may have their worth within their specific fields, they miss the crucial point – they miss the stark fact – the accounts of the individual survivors that swore an oath of witnessing, “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

As I purchased these texts my initial thought was, “What’s with all these books?” In answer to my own question – they are the books that contain the stark facts of the Holocaust, presented from a point of view inaccessible to my generation and those that follow – the point of view of the survivor. We have their memories.

What of meanings then? Consider Delbo, “They had no idea you could take a train to hell but since they were there they got their courage up and got ready to face what was coming together with their children, their wives and their old parents with their family memories, and family papers. They did not know that there is no arriving in this station.” In one of the few instances in written symbolism, the meaning is carried inherently in the statement. Atrocity literature, as I reflect on it, is perhaps the one genre that defies attachment of meaning beyond the memory itself. Philosophically, we often worry about some degree of background operating that allows for an accurate interpretation of any proposition. The assumption is that any proposition can shift meaning given a shift in background. The memories of Holocaust survivors do not offer themselves to this type of analysis. The meaning, in this sense, speaks for itself. There is no background available to us that are not Holocaust survivors from which to worry about shifts in meaning. The memory is the meaning. This may be hugely unsatisfying for some, but I would humbly challenge anyone to assign a meaning to Delbo’s observation not already contained in the memory itself. Western civilization is obsessed with this idea of “meaning.” We are constantly in the process of synthesizing various concepts, various sets of facts, intent on generating new ideas, new meanings. In fact, this process of synthesis, I might argue, is at the bottom of the undergraduate experience.

Within the literature of the Holocaust and certainly within the accounts of the visiting survivors we had the privilege of hearing during this course; we must come to a full-stop at second level interpretation. The meaning of the Holocaust is contained, fully, in the memories of the survivors. That these memories differ from survivor to survivor is no comment on the validity, the accuracy, of the meaning. It merely suggests that a stark fact can be experienced differently by different people – not that the fact is in dispute.

So, what is the meaning their memories convey? As suggested by Fella Warschau in addressing our class, “Don’t hate.” She elaborated greatly on this point – but her meaning was that hate resulted in her experience, that the methodical application of hate results in a Holocaust.
We have, then, two obligations as expressed in these memories, these stark facts, of the Holocaust. First, we must be loyal archivists – bringing their memories forth with us as needed elements of any global society. Second, we must not hate.

There is a third role we are obligated to fulfill as well. This role is more difficult to get at, though, as it requires of us an unnatural move. I encountered the following line of thought in a philosophy class (I want to say immediately that this concept is not necessarily applicable to those that suffered the Holocaust, I intend this more for my generation); “Human suffering is prolonged in that it is in the nature of humans to need to fully understand the basis of their suffering prior to taking any action to alleviate it.” Reflecting on my own life, I find this proposition to be acutely true, as I have many personal experiences in which I have continued to suffer engaged in searching for the meaning of my suffering, to the point of not taking clearly obvious action available to me to limit the pain, even as I sought to understand it.

The process of “understanding” prevents me from, in certain instances, doing the one thing I must do – and that is to mourn. I don’t suggest our role of mourning as somehow a step to healing. That is not what I mean. Consider, “If she does not bear witness to her experience of the unnameable, she too will be carried away by delirium and irrationality. In a word, it is quite clear: by madness. A modern Antigone, she confronts, then, the interdiction of mourning. Antigone had the chance to rise up against an explicit interdiction. However, this time she must struggle against an interdiction that is completely implicit but no less absolute.” While this account was written about a woman observing the Turkish Armenian genocide, the concept is applicable. I want to say that the act of mourning related to the Holocaust is possibly blocked, interdicted, by the magnitude of the atrocity – in that we, understandably, search for meaning – but within that search is the obstruction to a justified mourning. In short, we don’t need to “understand” to mourn.

We should not, then, continuously synthesize meaning from memories, but to be rightly overwhelmed by them, to cry, to hang our heads, to see our fellow humans in a different light – to allow the sadness to reach our very being – to mourn fully. This, too, is our role.
We have their memories and, by extension, we do hold the meaning to the Holocaust – and we must mourn – these have been the gifts of this class to me.

Works cited

Different Voices (1993). Ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. (pg 250). Paragon House / St. Paul, Minnesota.
Delbo, Charlotte. Arrivals, Departures. Ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. Different Voices (1993). (pg 60). Paragon House / St. Paul, Minnesota.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. (1986) Translated, Stuart Woolf. (pg 41). Simon & Schuster / New York.
Nichanian, Marc. Catastrophic Mourning. Ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. Loss. (pg 101). University of California Press / Berkeley.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. (1960). Translated, Stella Rodway. (pg 32). Hill & Wang / New York