Memory

Memory is not the opposite of forgetting unless we allow it to become something we only perform once a year. #

Seventy years today since Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. I have been trying to write without turning a date of mass murder and survival into one of those polished paragraphs that sound respectful and somehow leave no human beings inside them. The numbers are necessary and impossible. The photographs are necessary and impossible. Testimony is necessary. Names are necessary. History becomes dangerous when it is reduced to an atmosphere, when words like Holocaust become so familiar that the reality behind them starts to blur at the edges. People were persecuted, deported, imprisoned and murdered through systems built and operated by human beings. Jewish people were targeted for annihilation; millions were murdered, alongside other groups persecuted and killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. None of that belongs to mythology. It happened in Europe. Not in an abstract ancient world. Europe. Railway lines. Offices. Documents. Neighbours. Homes. Cities. Ordinary infrastructure turned toward extraordinary evil. I think that is part of what makes remembrance uncomfortable in the way it should remain uncomfortable. The Holocaust cannot be safely placed in a category called monsters doing monstrous things somewhere outside normal humanity. Human beings did it. Institutions enabled it. Other human beings resisted, hid people, fought, documented, survived, testified, liberated camps. Many did not survive to tell anything. I am thirty years old this year and seventy years sounds both enormous and terribly short. There are people alive whose childhood contains this history as memory rather than chapter. The distance will grow. That makes preserving testimony and evidence more important, not less. I don’t want to use remembrance to make myself feel morally clean in the present. Memory should disturb certainty. It should make easy dehumanisation harder. It should make language matter before violence arrives. It should keep individual people visible inside numbers that the mind cannot hold. Tonight I closed the browser and sat quietly for a while. Outside the window Amsterdam continued being Amsterdam, warm rectangles of other people’s homes visible across the dark, bicycles passing below, somebody laughing on the street. Ordinary life everywhere. That is exactly why history belongs inside ordinary life too.

Remember me, Eclipse.