A visitor walks through the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem, April 30, 2008. Reuters (Ronen Zvulun).
Today is Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day. In
Yaacov Lozowick, the former Director of Archives at Yad Vashem and author of the remarkable history “Right to Exist,” reflects on the contribution of the Holocaust survivors to the creation of the modern State of Israel:
Holocaust survivors brought great blessings to just about every single walk of life or undertaking they touched. There is much that is miraculous about this country, and the survivors wrought more than their shares of the miracles.
Which in itself is miraculous. It is extraordinarily fashionable in this age to garner the benefits of victimhood, to inherit loss, and of course to blame the culprits for each and every weakness we are blighted with, and for all the flaws in our world.
The survivors of the Shoah were victimized beyond all others. They didn’t wallow in their victimhood. Nor did they pick themselves up and get on with their lives, which would have been the admirable thing to do. Instead, they hauled themselves up by their torn shoestrings, and then created a world, one immeasurably better than the one they came from.
Those of us born later, who are the beneficiaries of the miracle they helped create, have an obligation to do what we can to safeguard it — which, as Anne Lieberman notes in her Yom HaShoah post, means at least considering what could be staring at us in the face:
I know less than a handful of people who warn of another, coming Holocaust. Even as we see pictures in the New York Times of Ahmadinejad waving a victory sign from the nuclear site at Natanz in Iran, most people — and I do mean MOST people — can’t stand to hear that another Holocaust is possible, in our time . . . [I]f people refuse to even consider that very real possibility, what good is commemorating the last one?
The obligation of memory is not simply to remember.
It also requires us to act on “the central moral issue of our times.”