"We Remember Only the Atrocities" and Other Signs of Amnesia (Part One)
The word ‘amnesia’ keeps haunting me. When people and countries embrace forgetfulness, do the lessons of genocide also vanish?
(Pictured above: Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial to honour Jews massacred by the Arrow Cross Party.)
This section is part of my memoir in progress, that for now I’m dubbing The Bubbe Tapes. It follows my research into my grandmother’s story, the legacy of the Holocaust for descendants and what it will mean for the next generation. I hope you will follow me on this journey.
There’s a fault in storytelling. Writers need to focus, to not bring in too many different ideas, to have a uniform perspective. This benefits readers by guiding them down a trustworthy path. It’s like watching a TV show. Maybe you can watch two at a time, three at most, but not 10. Otherwise, you lose the plot and hear only noise.
But this approach to storytelling comes with a risk of bias. Good journalists, and of course good media outlets, try to weigh the different sides of every story but we can’t force people to read all the angles. In the long term, the only stories we remember are the ones that touched us most deeply.
I view it as a type of passive amnesia; our minds remember one aspect and forget all the rest.
It should come as no surprise that our memories are suspect. Yuval Noah Harari, in a recent interview with Christiane Amanpour, touched on this point when he observed that “we remember only the atrocities.” He was referring to the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In contrast, Harari explains, we don’t remember the wars that didn’t take place, largely because countries and communities made a conscious decision not to rely on the memory of tragedies and instead, build a new future.
So why look back and examine the atrocities of the past? It’s a question I ask myself a lot, after spending considerable time re-examining my visit to Beregdaroc, the Hungarian village where my grandmother lived that deported all the Jews in April 1944. Not a single one returned, and the result of ethnic cleansing survives there to this day. (You can read more about the trip below.)
Maybe this preoccupation with “remembering” is a human defect. Or maybe, it’s the sign of our humanity. One of my favourite bible stories involves Lot’s wife, how she couldn’t help but look back at a tragedy unfolding, but the end result was that it transformed her forever.
This compulsion to remember, to avoid the amnesia that seems to have taken over my grandmother’s village, came up during a conversation I had with Omer Bartov, the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.
((Bartov is an expert on genocide and has written a lot recently on whether or not a genocide is taking place in Gaza — not yet but could be soon, he said — and the misuse of Holocaust imagery in the current conflict.))
This interview took place months before October 7 and focused on his book, a hybrid novel called The Butterfly and the Axe, about a historian searching for clues on what happened to a Jewish family murdered in a remote Ukrainian village in 1944. The book is an amalgamation of fiction and non-fiction. The inspiration for the book came from Bartov’s own desire to know what happened to his family, many of whom were murdered in the Holocaust, and how troubling it was for a historian like himself when no documentation can be found.
The book was published by Amsterdam Publishers. (Read my story about this incredible publishing house here.)
“I see in my generation, and I’m second generation and even in the third generation, that although we didn’t know what happened to our families — it’s not only my family but many others were sucked into an oblivion — it had an impact on us. It was a malign impact. It distorted us. This knowledge of something horrible that happened in the past that we cannot access. So, I wanted to follow that and think as a writer what happens when people who had inherited this trans- generational trauma, what happens when they tried to return to the scene of the crime? I was interested in Jews but also those who were involved. Not Germans, since they were from elsewhere, but the people who lived there. If the descendants of both go back, does it create some sort of closure or at least empathy? That’s what I really tried to think through in this book,” said Bartov.
It distorted us. That observation really hit home and like the characters in his novel, I believe on some level I was looking for closure, or at least empathy. Wait, no. If I’m being really honest, there’s an even deeper reason I travelled to this “village at the end of the world”: I was afraid of something being forgotten, that I may be one of the last people with a family connection to the Jews in this village and if I don’t remember it, no one else will. The indifference to the tragedy that paves the way for amnesia will have succeeded.
What do I mean by amnesia in the village? Well, according to a census before the war, maybe 12 Jewish families lived in Beregdaroc, approximately 70 people, many of them related (likely to me.) But where are their names? Not one person I met there could remember even one family name.
The closest I could get to the tragedy was during an interview with two octogenarian women who lived in the village all their lives. Although they were children during the war, one of them said she remembered the day of the deportation:
“I saw some school friends in line. When I went up to them, their father said they were ‘going away and never coming back.’”
Strange, I thought. From testimonies I had read, those deported on April 17, 1944, had no idea what was in store for them – if they’d be relocated, put to work, or killed. Perhaps her father meant that he would never want to return? Or perhaps this woman knew more than she let on.
Did she ever find out what happened to them? I wanted to ask but never did. Out of politeness, I assume. We were guests in their home. Maybe I was afraid of the answer. But now, as I struggle with this fear of forgetting, of others forgetting, I can’t help but wish that I had summoned the courage.
Part two of “Amnesia” will be published next week. Click the ❤️ button! It makes me feel good and helps others discover my work! You can also read other links in the series:
The Village at the End of the World
I love Bartov's description of 2Gs as being forced to contend with "an oblivion." Amnesia seems like a good response when there's nothing to hang onto...except, as you say, there's always that deeply human urge to try and remember. Really powerful material--looking forward to Part 2!
very good thankyou