WINDOWS OF RELIEF & RECORDS FOR THE FUTURE – 20.10.2023

Michael Rogatchi (C). Faces of the Shoah. 1992.

These days of sorrow and horror, for two weeks long and non-stop, I am trying to find some windows of relief, however small ones, to have a quick breath in between non-stop deepening shock. My windows are like that: I am relieved that we have lived the most of our life in the world that had not been this openly and forcibly hateful, with such hideous crimes against humanity and against Jewish people committed with no reason whatsoever, and with unleashed violent hate ever since. 

I am relieved that our parents who were children during the Second World War and the Holocaust are not here to see it. They should not see it again, I think. My aunt died a few weeks ago, and I was very sad about it, as the life-rope with my family has loosened one of its threads. I was deeply sad for days. And now, I am thinking that I am grateful for the timing of her passing, because  I just cannot imagine how painful it would be for her. 

I am relieved that our grandparents who were in their 30s and 40s during the Second World War and the Holocaust, and who lost to the Shoah so many members of their families, did not live to witness this current nightmare again. They would not be able to withstand it, however strong they were, I know. There are limits for what a human being can endure. 

I am relieved that Elie Wiesel, Leonard Cohen  and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks were spared not to see it. I am writing about these towering figures whom we were privileged to know personally, and whom I feel close to. I am relieved that those very fine people, with their very sensitive souls, were spared to see this feast of terror and what has followed it, in so many senses and in so many places world-wide, not to be shaken and traumatised deeply. 

Besides those four small windows of relief, I have none. Two weeks after the worst massacre of Jewish people after the Shoah, there is not a single serious development whatsoever to provide us with a possibility to have a normal breath. This is the reality, on the record. Perhaps, this kind of records would be useful sometimes in the future, as it was essentially important for us, all those who have been studying the Holocaust, real-time chronicles from the end of the 1930s onward.