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Why Remember and Whom
Dan Daor
“Some people thought that an art object was not the proper way of expressing the
Holocaust, which defies all aesthetic rules, and others concluded that the ideal project
would be one that expressed the fact that the Holocaust defied expression. And four
hundred and ninety-five artists sent various proposals for expressing a warning to future
generations and one proposed manufacturing a large, eight-colored six-pointed star
turning on its own axis, and others proposed constructing an enormous Ferris wheel,
on which concentration-camp wagons would be hung in place of the usual fair-ground
cars, and others proposed constructing a large bus station with red buses and timetables
on which the terminal stations would be the names of concentration camps. And others
proposed erecting thirty-nine steel posts on which WHY? would be written in various
languages, WARUM?, WARROM?, VARFØR?, PROC??, POURQUOI?, PERCHÉ?,
DLACZEGO?, CUR?, KUIDA?, MIKSI?, MIÉRT?, ZAKAJ?, KODE?L?, HVORFOR? JIATÍ?,
PSE?, NIÇIN?, etc. Some people were of the opinion that it ought to be a monument to the
victims not only of the Holocaust, but of all possible genocides, because only in that way
would in contain the living historical memory; otherwise it would be simply a heap of steel
or iron that would say nothing to anyone within twenty or so years. And some historians
said that building monuments was problematic in all events, because preserving the
memory of some event did not of itself guarantee that it would not be repeated, and they
provided instances of preserving memory that had led to fresh conflicts and wars.
And historians said that memorials helped classify society’s memories and organize the collective and fight against oblivion in general and above all against specific oblivion, and that it was actually also a way of creating other forms of oblivion, and philosophers said that even oblivion could be structural. Memorials stood in various places- in public precincts, in the open air, at the roadside or on battlefields, and anthropologists said that in the twentieth century the placing of memorials in various places served to reorganize symbolic space, and the organization of space was the basis of individual and collective identity in society and was, at the same time, a social institution and intellectual pattern and hence also a first condition of all history. The people who stopped at the memorial had the feeling of sharing slightly in the lives of the soldiers and partisans and concentration-camp prisoners, and also slightly in their deaths, and some historians said that memorials were like shellfish on the seashore when the tide ebbed along with memory, or like worms cut in half, in which there still wriggled a remnant of life, which was no longer real but symbolic. After the First World War memorials to the fallen soldiers started to be built, lest they be forgotten. Historians said that war memorials had existed before the First World War, but not until the 1920s had they become a universally shared symbol of remembrance and sculptors and masons were glad they received lots of commissions. War memorials were mostly built in the shape of steles or obelisks. At the top was a cockerel or St. George or an eagle depending on the nationality of the fallen soldiers, in the middle an armed soldier with a calm and determined expression and at the bottom women and children, and anthropologists and ethnologists said that this was typical for Indo- European culture. The names of fallen soldiers were often listed alphabetically. The most frequent words on the memorials were HOMELAND, HEROES, MARTYRS. And REMEMBER! Sometimes the memorials also bore the inscription A CURSE ON WAR! And in some cities monuments were also built to the soldiers condemned to death or to forced labor during the war for refusing to obey orders. And at Juvincourt in 1916 a soldier was executed for not having regulation trousers and refusing to take the trousers of a dead comrade because they were dirty and blood-stained. And in 1920, the French came up with the idea of a monument to the Unknown Soldier with an eternal flame which enjoyed great success, particularly in England and Belgium and Italy and also those new countries that had no history yet, such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc. An unknown soldier was a soldier whose head was blown off by en explosion, or whose identity tag had been shattered by an enemy bullet, or a soldier who had been buried in landslide, or a soldier who had got stuck in a bog. Anthropologists said that memorials were better at arousing reflection than museums or archives, because they appeal to memory rather than history, and memory is renewed whereas history removes the legitimacy of the living past by fixing it in time.” ‘Europeana’ by Patrik Ourednik Translated by Gerald Turner. Dalkey Archive Press. Normal. London 2001. Special thanks to Edgar de Burin. Death, any death, commands response. Not only an emotional response but a gesture, a deed, an action, something that will mark the attitude of the living to a particular death or to death in general. Just like elephants that lift their heads towards the sky when they encounter a dead elephant, so do human beings react when they see a dead body, a skull or a burial mound. They sigh, place a stone by the grave, read the inscription on the headstone, lift the skull, cross themselves, mumble a prayer or say something like: “in the days to come shall all be forgotten, and how dieth the wise man? As the fool.” This spontaneous gesture becomes more complex when attempting to create a tangible expression in memory of a person who excelled: Paolozzi’s statue of Newton on the piazza at the new British Library in London, for example; or the thatched hut in a garden in Chengdu, the capital of Sìchuan, that might just resemble and be in the same location as the original hut of China’s great poet, Du Fu; or the ever growing talus marking the place where Henry David Thoreau secluded himself on Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. These distinguished dead have become objects of admiration, emulation and inspiration. The places to which they are linked have become both tourist and pilgrimage sites. As a gesture in their honor, or to indicate that we belong to a certain cultural community, or perhaps to be blessed with a little bit of greatness (just as believers do when they visit graves of holy men or shrines of saints, in order to be blessed –’baraca’) and, while it is not always easy to visit a place where a dead man’s spirit resides (or even to know where that place is, as in the case of Homer) we can easily keep an icon, a little Buddha or a golden plaster bust of Beethoven on our piano. Things get even more complicated when the dead person is a war hero. As opposed to great minds whose accomplishments are more or less obvious, things are not always so clear cut when dealing with war heroes and their memorials: Queen Boadicea and her chariot statue in London, Say, or the Rani of Jhansi in Gwalior. Even if we agree that both were patriotic warriors, and even if we have nothing against them (as opposed to the National Ukrainian hero Khmelnytsky, for example ) the one certain fact about them is that they both lost their battles and failed in their efforts, the first in banishing the Romans and the second the British. So, it seems that losing the battle does not prevent one from becoming a national icon, on the contrary; like King Lazar of Serbia, whose colossal defeat in Kosovo, seven hundred years ago, is still today at the heart of national pride, even though it is not clear that this has always been so. The gap in time between the act and its symbolic- concrete expression exists for both individuals and groups. The honorary citizens of Calais who presented the keys of the city to the English invaders in the 14th century, waited till the 19th Century to attain their status as paragons of national sacrifice and heroism, and get a grand piece of sculpture as a memorial. Which, by the way, can not be said of the roaring lion at Tel-Hai, dedicated to a group of people, including a great national hero, who died before they could prove their vafour, in a battle which barely took place, and whose relevance to the history of the Jewish settlement in the land of Israel is negligible. In contrast, even though they too did not win, there is little doubt about the courage and heroism of the Jewish fighters in the ghettos, who would have been granted respect and honor wherever heroes are commemorated. But, something has changed in our attitude towards heroes, and the desire to worship, emulate and identify oneself with them. ‘Today, in the race to the memorial, as in workshops for creativity, any one can. You do not have to do anything, just be a victim. The blurring of the divide between heroes and victims has reached its peak with the commemoration of the Holocaust, of course, but apparently it began after the First World War, when every city in Europe put up a monument listing the names of all the local soldiers who fell while serving their country, be they real heroes or not. This blurring was further emphasized by the even more national monuments for all soldiers: The Unknown Soldier, in memory of those we don’t know anything about, neither their name or place of death, nor what they had done there .This of course is what makes these soldiers so perfect as national symbols. Real people have many attributes, bad ones and good ones. They also happen to belong to many different groups, professional, religious, cultural, sexual, tribal, etc. Only one of these identities is national. The ‘Unknown Soldier’ does not have any of these other affiliations; he has nothing but his national identity and therefore, can be appropriated with the characteristics deemed fit by the ideological leaders of the nation, in other words, an array of clichés (proud, cruel, heroic, noble, kind, with a good sense of humor) which in their opinion are characteristic of their people (distinguishable from other nations). “His” grave therefore is the ideal place for foreign dignitaries. The visitors’ presence at the site signals recognition of their hosts’ sacrifices, while the hosts do not risk identifying with a real hero, one that historians may found out to be a rabid racist or a serial killer. All the memorials, whether in the middle of a big city (so that many come across them by chance, like the Cenotaph in the centre of London), or in far away villages, which most visitors have to travel to (for example the drummer boy that saved Napoleon’s life at Cadenet in Provence), have all been designed to be looked at and not to be enclosed in. The viewer remains in the space of his every-day life, the world of the living, whereas the symbol of the dead, the statue or monument is an outsider. School children who are taken to visit these memorials, as part of their national identity-building education, or visitors from foreign countries who have come to pay their respect, are almost completely free to ignore them (the statues, national symbols, death). This freedom is harder to attain in memorial structures with an interior, sites which aim to recreate or redesign a total situation (a torture dungeon from the middle ages, a besieged bunker from WWII, a concentration camp, a Vietcong system of rescue tunnels etc.). An installation that places the visitor in a new environment, one that is severed from his every-day life, laced with symbolic meaning, obscure as it may be. As opposed to the physical relations between the monument and the viewer, within the internal space the residents represent death whereas the visitor is the outsider. 
The idea that it is at times useful to uproot people from their natural surroundings, (for
a limited period) so they be able to identify (or at least relate to an experience, distant
from their own) with something larger than their own selves – and that placing them in an
enclosed symbolic space is an effective way of doing this - is hardly new. It has given rise
not only to churches and temples but also to Sufi holy graves ( e.g. the Dargah of Moinuddin
Chishti in Ajmer, Rajistan, a sacred shrine located in a small room where the devotees
come and, in overcrowded conditions run frantically around the grave) or, fairy tale Walt
Disney styled worlds, concept restaurants and museums. And, of course, commemoration
halls.
But, as opposed to churches and museums, it is not clear what sort of a ‘total experience’ we are supposed to go through when entering these last. The Yad Vashem Museum, for example, which “has been entrusted in preserving the memory of the Holocaust, imparting its legacy for generations to come, so that such atrocities will never be forgotten”, does not only document history providing an indispensable tool for researchers who inform the general public through their books on the subject, but aims to provide each citizen and visitor, through its space studded with structures, avenues, monuments and piazzas, a guided tour to hell and back. Why? It seems that the unforgettable atrocities of the Holocaust will be better preserved in documents, books, diaries, photographs, films and recordings and not in an attempt artistically to design a space in which to lead school children, tourist groups and foreign visiting dignitaries. All this design gives the impression of an emotional (or ideological) manipulation, persuading the viewer to remember what ‘Amalek did unto us’. The dead are not just victims but sacred heroes and you, the viewer who identifies with them, is also a victim and has the right to do unto others as has been done unto you. As opposed to the heavy symbolism that the architects’ of Yad Vashem have bestowed on this place, and its slightly problematic use (does an individual who has come to honor his parents’ memory or search for the village where his grandfather was born, really want to encounter the German President’s body guards on an official visit ?) Beit Yad Labanim offers an alternative. In this memorial house for the fallen IDF soldiers in Tel Aviv there is an atmosphere of simplicity which makes this modest and almost hidden place - with its spacious halls, surrounding gardens and central memorial gallery - a most suitable place to reflect upon the dead and their legacy to us. Over three walls of the center hall there are lists with the names of all the soldiers who died in Israel’s wars. Democratically listed, without rank, position or heroic feat (this information can be found on a user-friendly web site, on the computer that stands on a platform). As our gaze progresses through the list of names, from the War of Independence through to the Lebanon War, something rather unsurprising is revealed. If this presentation is to be believed then not only are there no heroes but in fact there has only been one long war, which began with the establishment of the state of Israel and continued until there was no more room on the wall, not like the monuments in Europe honoring the fallen of the First and Second World Wars. It is most likely that there too, some of the soldiers lost their lives during their military service, due to military accidents and suicides whilst, others came back from overseas in a coffin. They are not so national, apparently, in the ‘new Europe’ which does not define itself through its dead sons. Not so for us, in Israel. Every person who died wearing the IDF uniform, be it in a road accident, friendly fire, a misguided bullet, during war or in times of peace (even though, from this list of names it seems there was no such time during the past 58 years) is listed here, together forming a long, long line. Here too, in this pleasant space, the message of Yad Vashem is reiterated: there are no heroes, only ‘the Eternity of the Jewish People’, the whole country is always a frontier, and we are all victims.
Translation: Aya Rupin
Dr. Dan Daor, Sinologist. Editor and publisher, and a senior partner in the Xargol publishing house.
His translations into Hebrew include the classical erotic novel Rou Pu Tuan, by Li Yu.
He writes about literature, art, film and restaurants for various newspapers and periodicals.
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