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There are no Holocaust survivors By Yehudit Winkler Tags: Holocaust Remembrance Day Most of the friends of my 95-year-old mother are no longer with us. With her insights, her power of survival, her talent for suppression and her uncanny ability to be here and to live only with the good times that preceded what she calls "then," I would not be surprised if the rest of her life, as she approaches the goal of great old age, is surprising. Like most of her friends who were cataloged in Israel as survivors, remnants, people from the camps and ghettos and forced laborers who saved themselves, to the end of their days they were not saved. The physical, and mainly the emotional wounds, their shattered lives, their world that had been destroyed, their dear ones who were torn away from them forever, turned them into shadows who walked and walk among us in disguise. And we, because of our inability to internalize the dimensions of the horror, and perhaps for fear of having to share the burden, find it difficult to make room in our hearts for genuine compassion. Advertisement There is a great degree of pretense on Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day. Not because there is no intention of remembering it, but because a separation is made between the Holocaust as a general concept for the horror, and the people themselves: my mother, her friends, even the survivors who are forced to humiliate themselves in the face of the insensitivity of the governments and leaders of Israel, in order to merit, for example, crumbs of financial assistance. They are humiliated not only because their voice has faded and their elbows are weak, but because in the roots of the Israeli consciousness, their place is missing because they scratch the false collective image of the new Israel. In the 60 years since the establishment of the State, and the 63 years since the end of World War II, the collective consciousness has not understood that the destruction of European Jewry is one of the sources of strength for the existence of a Jewish state, and that those who were rescued from the inferno carry the resurrection on their backs. They are giants who are worthy of admiration and the true heroes of the 20th century. Had they been perceived as such in the first place, we would not have been witness to fathers and mothers who concealed the history of the dark days from their offspring, and there would have been no need decades later to conduct special campaigns in order to take testimony from those who were still alive. Their imprint is almost absent from the Israeli cultural legacy as well. Israeli dramaturgy, instead of being a leader in giving expression to the unparalleled human and collective tragedy, ignores it for the most part. As in a synchronized chord - literature, cinema, music and dance do the same. This is no coincidence. We grew up on the myth of power, whereas the Holocaust, due to a distorted perception of the founding fathers, was cataloged as weakness. "Like lambs to the slaughter." Only after several decades had passed, under pressure from the ghetto fighters, was any effort made to amend the concepts, and "heroism" was added to "Holocaust." The speeches that will be delivered as they are every year have become loathsome. Not because they are not true, but because there is no clear connection between the literal truth and the truth of life; and therefore they are infuriating. There is a need to admit that those who saved themselves from there did not really get a genuine embrace here. They walked among us, and the handful who remain still walk among us, by dint of existential inertia. Because there are no real Holocaust survivors. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Hamas on the Holocaust Al-Aqsa TV claims Jews concocted the Holocaust. Grasping genocide How a non-Jew in Israel came to understand the Holocaust.   1.   Myth of power 12:45  |  Ofer from Ofer 01/05/08   2.   Please visit 12:48  |  A mother 01/05/08   3.   Survivors built Israel 12:49  |  Charles 01/05/08   4.   we are the past 13:21  |  sweis Melbourne 01/05/08   5.   Survivors helped build Israel 15:14  |  Shalom Freedman 01/05/08

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