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The Human Imagination and the Holocaust
February 3, 2008
“The great secret of morals is love: or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own. A man has to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively: he must put himself in the place of another and of many others: the pains and pleasures of the species must become his own.”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley: “A Defense of Poetry”
Studying and writing about the Holocaust is a testing ground for all of us. What we test is our ability to remain human when confronted by the machine. I believe that if we have the courage to engage the Holocaust, we have the ability and the courage to wreck the machine of hate. There really are no answers to the Holocaust, only questions we must ask ourselves in its presence. Those questions define us and shape our response to the world. The Holocaust urges us to tell our stories of the world with human words, and makes it clear to us that we must remember to be human. Salvation lies in remembrance. The pains and pleasures of human kind must become our own and we must not forget.
The imagination and the ability to empathize with others is the key to living a fuller life. But, imagination and identification are also menacing. As we read and listen to the words of survivors, as we study the Holocaust from all points of view, our imaginations threaten us. As I pick up Elie Wiesel’s Night, I take the Holocaust in my hands, and I hear the children’s’ voices in the dark. I am afraid for them and for myself. First, I am afraid my imagination will fail me, and I will be overwhelmed. The terror and humiliation of the Holocaust may so “numb” me that I will go into shock. I will isolate myself, deny everything: suffering, empathy, mercy, family, G-d.
I will experience what Wiesel experienced when his father was struck and did nothing (36-37), or, in the end, I will abandon my father, Wiesel says to me,” I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my father’s place lay another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn to the crematory. He may still have been breathing…his last word was my name. A summons: to which I did not respond.” (106).
I imagine myself in Wiesel’s place. I imagine myself in his father’s place. I imagine myself taking him to the crematory. I imagine myself being the next invalid. Would it be different for me? How much could I take before I was numb to my father’s summons? Next, I am afraid my imagination will put me in the camps with the victims. I will smell the smoke, experience for myself the horror of murdered children: those tiny hands that might cautiously fit into mine. A child might say, “Save me,” and I will be helpless.
What if I imagined myself as Mengele, placing myself at the head of the selection line? I refuse to imagine this. However, I can still sense what it is like to be him. He has borrowed a conductor’s wand from the Jewish band he forces to play during executions. Perhaps, he is hearing a Bach fugue as he waves his baton to the left and to the right. He is deciding perhaps, not only who will live and who will die but who among the living will serve his science. He might dream briefly, as he selects, about what he may have for lunch… what wine, what bread. His mental life is full of concerns for his comfort and his work. He knows what his victims only suspect. They are dead. He is in charge and will soon eat a good lunch.
Reading and writing about the Holocaust are acts of faith in the power of “human words” to interfere with the killing machine that created the Holocaust and that is still clanking its way through history. The same urge to power, domination, and death chugs on through the night. Speaking human words and listening for them is an act that promises the machine will someday rasp to a halt, stalled by those who have the courage to confront with their imagination both the possibility of being a victim and of being an oppressor, but choose rather to resist death, to reconcile differences and celebrate the borders of their lives where they meet the “other.”
Greta Brewer
Vice President of Education,
NEXT GENERATIONS
NEXT GENERATIONS is under the auspices of LEAH, League for Educational Awareness of the Holocaust.
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