Less than two weeks ago, Portland, Maine and the U.S. once again observed Yom Hashoah, the day of Holocaust remembrance.
More than 70 years after the last Jew was murdered and the last concentration camp inmate found freedom but was not yet free, every state in our nation and even our national government paused to remember the destruction of European Jewish life and civilization and to honor those few who survived the most extensive genocide of the 20th century.
Who are the survivors of the Holocaust? They are a generation at the end of its existence. They have been the voice of a moral authority that has had no equal.
After all, they had looked over the abyss and seen an evil that was unprecedented in human history.
And because they soon realized that such evil had not been destroyed, had only lost the battle but not the war, they sought to tell the world that humanity was still in danger.
Perhaps the evil would not strike them again so quickly, but it could strike other groups just as easily. This evil had no preference for the color of a person’s skin, nor for geographic location nor religious affiliation. It devoured any and all who wandered into its path and it would kill again and again and continues to do so to this very day.
That genocide destroyed a civilization, a language and one-third of the world’s Jewish population.
Those who survived what we call the Holocaust and sometimes the Shoah, but what they called the Hurbn (the destruction), spent a half-decade or more in the Jewish Displaced Persons’ camps of Germany, Austria and Italy, waiting with great impatience, but not without re-creating for themselves a sense of Jewish identity and creativity, for the chance to leave the nations and the continent that was soaked with Jewish blood.
And they watched with a sense of amazement and a huge disappointment as thousands of non-Jewish Displaced Persons, many of them willing accomplices of national socialism in its efforts to destroy European Jewry, were granted refugee status by the United States and allowed to enter its gates.
But very few of the Jewish survivors were granted the same status.
Some, however, did come to America. On May 8, 1945, the novelist Isabella Leitner wrote about the sea voyage that made her one of the first survivors of Auschwitz to escape from one universe into another:
“Dr. Mengele, we are on our way to America and we are going to forget every brutal German word you forced us to learn. We are going to learn a new language. We are going to ask for bread and milk in Shakespeare’s tongue. We will learn how to live speaking English and forget how people die speaking German.”
A year later, Ida Mae Kahn, president of Boston’s Jewish Family and Children’s Service, received a phone call that “a group of children are being sent to Boston. We have no place to put them … they have no connections, no one to turn to. We’ve got to make provisions for them.”
The children were all Jewish orphans whose families had been murdered in the Holocaust. They were brought from New York, where they had landed, to a summer camp that the JFCS had recently purchased. It was called Camp Kingswood and was located in Bridgton, Maine.
They may have very well been the first group of Holocaust survivors to arrive in the state.
The first of these orphans, perhaps eight of them, came to Camp Kingswood in 1947 with all the characteristics that marked the lives of survivors in the early years after their liberation.
One of the staff members of the camp remembered that “one of the biggest problems we had was that the kids would steal food and bring it back to the tents. And we tried to explain to them, there was a mild language problem … that there was plenty of food. They found it hard to believe. There was a perpetual hunger … They just never felt secure that there would be enough food for them.”
Most Holocaust survivors, those who decided to come to America, would not arrive until 1948, when Congress and President Harry Truman amended immigration laws to allow increased numbers of Jewish survivors to arrive on American shores. By 1953, nearly 140,000 had done so.
We know from various sources, that some of the survivors sought, in those first months and years in America, to bear witness, to tell their Jewish sponsors and beyond what they had seen as they looked over the abyss. What they found, was another kind of exile, another kind of prison. People welcomed them with tears and jobs when they stepped off the boats, then turned away.
Why was it that no one wanted to listen? Was that why officials from the Jewish community were only interested in how survivor families had spent the money they had been given so that they might have food and shelter?
And when they found work, they would no longer have to assume responsibility for the survivor family and mark them “case closed”?
Most survivors decided then and there that there was no point in seeking to explain the unexplainable.
But over a quarter of a century later, in the 1980s, the survivors realized that if they did not recount their stories of death and survival to thousands in classrooms and into the cassette and video recorders of numerous history projects, the memory of the event itself would disappear into a footnote of history.
That is why the survivors and their children, the Second Generation, were instrumental in helping to create Holocaust museums and centers in nearly every American state and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on the sacred soil of American memory.
That is why the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine in Augusta, founded in 1985, continues to reach out to the entire state with its message of remembrance and the need for human and social change.
But what will happen when the last survivor of the Holocaust is no more? Who will take up the voice of moral authority that was theirs? Who will be the “warning to the world” that genocide did not stop in 1945 and continues to strike in both ways we understand and in ways we do not? What will happen to Holocaust memory itself?
These are the questions we must confront sooner rather than later.
Abraham J. Peck, the son of two Holocaust survivors, is a professor of history at the University of Southern Maine.
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