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Short thread: The importance of eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust cannot be overstated. The enormity of the killing machine, the horrible massiveness, r not in doubt by anyone serious, but the details are what fade or fray as survivors are no longer able to tell their story...
This year, with the young unable to meet the old in person, provides a preview of what a future with no survivors may look like, but the fact that former camps and other sites cannot be visited is also a scary vision of how easily the realness of what occurred can slip from us...
That& #39;s why I think this year, the US @HolocaustMuseum & #39;s David Boder collection is more important than ever. Boder recorded the stories of 107 survivors in DP camps in the immediate aftermath of the war, while the wounds were fresh and the Shoah was not a memory but life itself..
To my knowledge, there is no parallel historical testament made as close to in situ as possible. The voices are frighteningly familiar, they are our own. They are the voices of people still trying to understand what the world, the greater world and their inner world, has become..
My grandfather, who is a survivor in every sense of the word, slips back into the Polish forest during his less lucid moments. He has never stopped talking about what happened to him and his family. But it was always distant to me, always unreal....
To many in my generation and younger, I think the Holocaust is Another Country. It is Another Planet. It is Remembrance. It is Never Again. It is Never Forget. It is Rise Up From Ashes. But what it is not is here. It is not now. It is not experiential, hard as we try...
For me, at least, the Boder recordings come close to making it real. The sorrow, the confusion, the rare moments of joy (Boder asked many of his subjects to sing), the pure humanity, distilled into its most essential form....
It is more than a living memory. It is more than a testimony. It is life. full stop. It is an antidote to deniers, to those who idiotically compare lockdown orders to Nazi extermination....
If you have some time today, or ever, I highly recommend listening to the recordings, digitized and hosted by the Galvin Library at @illinoistech http://voices.iit.edu/voices_project
Here">https://voices.iit.edu/voices_pr... is a picture of Boder in a DP camp in 1946
Here">https://voices.iit.edu/voices_pr... is a picture of Boder in a DP camp in 1946
