By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*

The importance of Holocaust memory and the responsibility to remember the atrocities committed to prevent them from happening again

A visit to Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, certainly brings up many memory connections. We experience death in our changing bodies, in the passage of our loved ones, in the bitter memories of friends and in the brutal exercises of war. My visit to that Memorial – back in the 1970s – prompted me to take a closer look at the space, because it was sunny outside and the walk inside seemed to take me to the unfathomable.

Perhaps because I was accustomed to reading texts from the Middle East and Hebrew and Jewish literature, I was caught between looking at the names and the dead of Nazism and the bodies that inhabited stories, tales, novels and poems, which had something of a torn memory, a pain of loss, memories that spoke of uncontrolled evil and unanswered questions. In fact, the inevitable question that arose here and there was that childish one: Why? Why?

Today I think that I must have invented a world that permeated Yad Vashem and was mixed with the pain and deaths that I knew, as well as those that I would still experience. Although infinitely smaller than the pain of the people violated in Auschwitz (whom I also met later and where I felt the unfathomable), they were mine, real and imagined, at the age of 30.

I must have been, as Carlos Drummond says, “dispersed and before borders” for the imagination of the visit. The memorial, which is a museum, library, school, research center, institute, memorial trees, etc. (and therefore is a bit of the world) has its name based on a text from the prophet Isaiah 56:5 and therefore carries a responsibility before the world, this calculating world that kills itself in killing and forgets the names and the dead to guarantee new deeds of pain and death in other times and places.

That memorial could be carried around the Earth and, on its return to Jerusalem, it would be even more burdened with vital respect, with new pillars of memory and with the worldly feelings of millions, perhaps billions of people. If I were to visit it again, I would have to have much more strength to organize the movement of pain and death. Perhaps I would not be able to do so.

This testimony reaffirms my vital respect for Yad Vashem/Holocaust, an incomparable and inescapable memory of pain. Hence, in times when life is trivialized, it is indefensible. In vain will it be asked that this memorial has nothing to do with phenomenon A or B of the present, or of the past, perhaps of the future…

How can we suggest this when everyone is armed with programmed languages? So is the one who proposes not to compare, or worse, not to suppose analogies between the Jewish Holocaust and phenomena A or B. Also by deepening the value of incomparability, Yad Vashem/Holocaust has nothing to do with the current government of Israel, banal, sarcastic, incompetent and reactionary. Its prime minister is escaping being accused and even being punished internally; therefore, it has nothing to do with the memorial world placed on the Mount of Remembrance.

Beyond analogies, what is possible and desirable to do is to testify, as did the Holocaust survivors, whose speeches and texts did not focus on comparisons or analogies, but rather on the image of pain, affliction, hunger and debauchery orchestrated by Nazi and fascist murderers and their chain of death logistics. In those testimonies, the imagination also leads to the pain and death of gypsies, homosexuals, political activists, prisoners of war, Roma, disabled people and people with differences.

No contemporary scare, therefore, in the face of the worldwide hunt for Diversity. She was shot in the Holocaust and her memory did not produce the good scar that leads to healing. She remained open. She is open. This is what literature, poems, stories and cases have testified to, some of which made up the strangeness of my memory during my visit to the Memorial.

In the dimension of testimony/testimony, a radical act of seeing, the world told and narrated by Yad Vashem gains the status of a will to value, a perfect act of the person who, through sight and memory, seeks to find in the phenomenon of that war, of those European lands, of those times and those murderous procedures a set of human attitudes that will have to be overcome and conquered, because they will never be forgotten. In this sense, to forget is to begin to die. And may the gardens of the Finzi Contini always be reread.

Yad Vashem is not countable for comparisons, but it certainly has the right to do so. I have always been among those who do not do so, because I saw there the concrete world of death that questions the very people who created the memorial, questions me, questions life, questions everyone. It does not question Israel in particular, because the Memorial becomes the world in the memory of the visitor committed to memory. That time, those dead, those murderers in those places metaphorize what the hands of the world can do.

Therefore, Nazism and fascism need to be thoroughly circumscribed and characterized by the best science and its precise awareness. For many testimonies are needed for memories to exchange meanings and enunciate the precision of evil and the forms of its misfortunes. But the questioning drawn from the Memorial also does not make lists of evils and deaths, for it is likely that we will leave the Memorial forever questioned as someone who creates a new responsibility, added to the others we already have or had. It is that of active memory in the face of evil. If this active memory still lacks theory and practice, nevertheless it is to this that Yad Vashem of the Holocaust addresses itself.

* Luiz Roberto Alves He is a research professor at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo and member of the Alfredo Bosi Chair at the Institute of Advanced Studies at USP. Author, among other books, of Build curricula, train people and build educating communities (Avenue) [https://amzn.to/42bMONg]

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