Julia Schwartz

March 9, 2004

In response to the picture, I don’t really know what to say. What am I supposed to say? Should I say that this is vile? Inhumane? Do you want me to say “gee, that’s terrible”? Because really, that’s not how I feel. I already know it’s terrible. I’ve felt that pain of that little boy since the time I started Hebrew School . It’s called being Jewish, and knowing what those conditions – and the worse conditions that still existed – were like for people… and not just some arbitrary people in some video or book or article that I’ve never met and never will meet, but my family, my relatives, the relatives of people I know.

This entire entity that people can talk about analytically as long as they want goes beyond words and meanings and dates and definitions and some history of how Hitler rose to power through exploiting the economic needs of his country; it isn’t Kristallnacht as it fits into a plot of genocide, it isn’t the Kristallnacht behind some shattered store windows, because that wasn’t all there was. Kristallnacht is the overwhelming sorrow and sadness and loss that you can feel in a sanctuary on a dark November night when the entire congregation is singing a song mourning a little girl who burned in the “fires of Treblinka.” It’s the knowledge that once again, you always have to be aware of who you’re letting know who you are, because maybe you’ll be hated or killed. It’s why I won’t ever go to Germany, it’s why we all have that innate, maybe ignorant but surely understandable fear of Germans, it’s why those old-fashioned, two-note Nazi sirens, or sounds like them, still make us all look around and try to find possible cover. It’s the reason I’ve have dreams since I was little about disabled kids getting tested as a part of all the Nazi “science research” or being caught inside of one of Hitler’s nasty facilities with no way out but death.

That’s the Holocaust. It’s not some photocopied packet, it’s not one single picture of one little boy. It’s the gut feeling, the fear, the cold hard feeling that you might die any second and for no reason in Hell. It’s the realization that half of those people “like you” are gone forever, and that hatred doesn’t just die with the signature on a military surrender.

Seeing one more image does no more to supplement my feelings upon the Holocaust. It’s not that I possess some sort of immunity to the terrors; it’s not that my mind is closed off to learning something more. It’s just that all the analysis does nothing to me to bring anything new alive. What brings the tragedy alive again, what draws the tears and the fear and the tremendous sorrow (not even so much anger, for still so much fear presides), is the concrete images that can be connected with human life. To connect, there needs to be that third dimension, be it through first person narrative or getting to know a character in a movie, or seeing something perhaps ordinary to some, but so sacred to us simply smeared.

The video reels of the Nazi troops parading through Berlin are not scary for their masses, but only for the knowledge of what those masses did: their cold hard disconnection with life and not one hesitation about holding a gun up and blasting some poor starving Jewish man, woman, or child’s brains out simply because she existed. Maybe pictures tell stories. Maybe sometimes, things can’t even be called stories, and the picture just can’t go that far. Maybe the understanding’s already there. You have to have some sort of a connection with a tragedy to truly understand it. I don’t think the only people who can understand the horrors of the Holocaust are the Jews. But as it has been for thousands of years, before Hitler was even a star in the sky, there is a connection there and it is personal mourning. There’s sympathy, there’s empathy, there’s understanding… and then there’s pain and fear.