Braided memories of the Holocaust

Shortly before his death, the Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi observed that the stories of the victims of the Holocaust, “those who did not return,” can never be fully recovered.

 Levi acknowledges the limitations of the memories of survivors like himself who, while having suffered unspeakably in concentration camps, “never fathomed them to the bottom.” But unwilling to consign the dead to oblivion, Levi understands that the living must “speak in their stead, by proxy.”

When we gather as a community on Yom Hashoah to remember the Holocaust and to commemorate its victims, we take on Levi’s mantle of memory by proxy. By now, of course, the majority of people at commemorative ceremonies have no personal memory of the Nazi genocide. Our remembrance draws on several memory strands: personal memory, familial memory, collective memory and historiography.

Personal memory draws on the recollections of survivors and other eyewitnesses. We are privileged to live among survivors of Nazi persecution who made their way to Canada. These personal memories, shared with one’s intimate circle and sometimes with total strangers, open a portal to the past as nothing else can. Many survivors have made the painful journey backward into the past to write memoirs, record testimonies and craft creative works.

Familial memory builds on a mixture of stories, traditions and ways of being that are passed down from generation to generation, both consciously and unconsciously. Graphic artist Art Spiegelman, for example, recalls that when his mother would take him shopping as a little boy and he needed to find a washroom, she would tell him quite casually of the latrines at Auschwitz. One of my students told me she saw aspects of her father in a story our class was reading about a child survivor who, as an adult, kept purchasing properties in an impossible attempt to recover his lost home.

Collective memory is forged from the way that a community looks back at the past and understands its meaning. Even when time passes and the events recede into the distant past, they remain in living memory, relevant to the present. Like the story of Pesach, the way a society speaks about its past both reflects and affirms its sense of identity, values, and cohesion as a people.

These three ways of engaging the past – personal, familial and collective – have traditionally been seen as different from, and in opposition to, historiography, the writing of history. Relying on documentary evidence to establish a factual account of what happened, history has been seen as a more objective, distanced endeavour, more reliable than memory, but also more detached.

This dichotomy is spelled out by Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist who first developed the concept of collective memory. Writing between the two world wars, he noted: “So long as remembrance continues to exist, it is useless to set it down in writing or otherwise fix it in memory… the need to write the history of a period, a society, or even a person is only aroused when the subject is already too distant in the past to allow for the testimony of those who preserve some memory of it.”

Much of what we understand today of collective memory draws on Halbwachs’ insights. But the study of the Holocaust has broken down the opposition between history and memory, bringing these two modes into fruitful conversation. Historical documentation has been ongoing, robust and abundant. Simultaneously, the voice of testimony has grown more urgent and more resonant.

Poignantly, Halbwachs himself would not live to see the evolution of his concepts. A Catholic professor at the Sorbonne, he was married to a Jewish woman, the daughter of a prominent French Jewish intellectual. Outraged by the roundup of French Jews by the French militia, Halbwachs protested to the Vichy government. After his wife and in-laws were deported to concentration camps, he himself was imprisoned by the Gestapo in Lyons, and then sent to Buchenwald. His death there is recounted by his former student, the novelist Jorge Semprun, who was sent to Buchenwald as a member of the Resistance.

Holocaust commemoration exemplifies Halbwachs’ understanding of memory as dynamic, profound and alive. Drawing on diverse sources of knowledge and understanding, it allows us to braid these varied strands into a complex retrieval of the past.