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This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network. The diminishing numbers of survivors of history's worst atrocity. The industrialized murder of millions with the goal of total eradication of an ancient people.
The genocide known as the Holocaust. With the passing of living witnesses, the challenge of remembering becomes increasingly urgent. Welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on ideas. I'm your host Renee Garfinkle.
Today's guest, Nihagavrin, is an award-winning and prolific author, poet, and theatre director. She's also the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. We're honored to have her with us today to discuss a book of singular importance, the product of years of groundbreaking and heartbreaking work by a group of artists, scholars, and descendants of survivors. They work together on the core mission of developing ways to reshape Holocaust, Shoa, Remembrance, away from the singular narrative of Jewish victimhood, toward a multifaceted recognition of human dignity.
The result of their years of work is the book we'll discuss today, called, But There Was Love, Shaping the Memory of the Shoa. Nihagavrin, welcome to the podcast. Welcome, and thank you very much, Renee. Nihagav, why was it important for you and your co-editors to replace Holocaust with Shoa in the title?
What meanings are gained or lost in that shift? First of all, I was not the first one to do that. Claude Lansman in his monumental movie, Shoa, struggled to change the title of Holocaust. You know that in Hebrew, the name is Shoa, in Edi Shitshuban, and in the European languages, the term Holocaust has in it the reminiscence of the non-Jewish consciousness, of the Christian consciousness.
The Latin meaning is hollow, cost is a total sacrifice, and which was totally absent from the self-consciousness and self-image that the victims had on themselves. So by doing a coining the title as reshaping or shaping the memory of the Shoa, we stress our objection to that term Holocaust that immediately brings with it false connotations and the gaze of the outsider on the Jewish people. And we open here something which is very timely, the first discussion between Christian and Muslim images and the self-inches of the Jewish people. In the book's introduction, you call for remembrance rooted in resistance and resilience, rather than victimhood.
How has that basic idea been received among survivors and the broader public? Actually, we were expressing their own ideas. We quote in the hit-consuit, which is a ceremony that came out also from our work, we quote the manifesto written by the survivors and we had the honour of the person who wrote it, that called Reddit and Loud for Us. They say that as Victor Frankl says, there was despair, there was giving up, and there was also a struggle to survive against the Nazis.
And I think that this is the most important legacy of how people survive in human extreme worlds on the brink of death. And as Aaron Applefeld said to us, there was love and love to a child, of a mother, of people each other, the knowledge how to say a word. That was what kept the people alive. And I think that this legacy was forgotten because of the ambient Christian legacy that sees in victimhood and in sacrifice a way to salvation.
And this is something which was very foreign to Jewish legacy. And we wanted to stress that and to give something to the world by reminding, as we now learn from those who were in the tunnels kidnapped by Hamas, that this is the human power that gives you the force to go on living. And that is the big legacy of the survivors of the Shoah, according to myself and the group that we were working together. That's really a stark difference between salvation coming from martyrdom or self-sacrifice or victimhood versus salvation coming from the struggle to be, to continue.
Absolutely. We touch here into the core of the theology. I mean, the Jewish theology gives the power to mankind and to humans, to participate in the creation of the non-perfect world, while the Christians mostly are waiting to the return of the of the Savior. But I would like to say that love is also a legacy of Christianhood.
And fortunately, there were many loving Christians, the just among the nations who helped rescue Jews. So the image is not clear. But I mean, speaking in general terms, that's the point. Let's talk about the process of the working group.
The group was extremely diverse. The research group included survivors, descendants of survivors, artists and scholars. How did the diversity influence the direction and the tone of the project? Coming from literature and theatre directing, I knew that we have to touch the soul and not only stay on the level of ideas.
When in the first meeting, Eti Dinsa can sing for us the Song of the Jews of Saloniki as they arrived in Auschwitz in Landino, and then Mendecan sang a song in Edich, and all of us started to dance around the tables of Alleur. I knew that the point is there. I mean, the meetings were scholarly and emotionally mixed together. I don't think that you can remember without that dimension.
We had the honour of hosting Awan Appelfeld who spoke in a very personal way, then a conversation between Shout Friedlander and Otto Dovka, the great scholars of the history of the Shoah who were both survivors, all of them, I mean, with Appelfeld, were the survivors. I mean, people met for the first time in that way the legacy of their parents. So I think that the group had a dimension of scholarship and shifting the memory from victimhood and sacrifice into resilience and power of the spirit, but it also had a tremendous power of breaking what I call the, how you said that in English, the gala, something that covers a wound, and that silence that characterized Israel in the first years was broken in the group. People could relate to their own stories in a new way.
And I think that this is our role now when the survivors are not with us, are disappearing with a great pain, and we don't hear their voice. How to live with this memory in the present time? And I see we see more of wars and more of the same attitude that we forgot about, the power of the human to stand against and to hope and to live. You mentioned the silence that characterized Israel in the beginning, right after the war that people didn't talk about their experience.
How did your mother's silence about her wartime experiences, especially the murder of her first family, impact you back when you were a child and later as an adult? Just want to add that the silence was both ways because people didn't want to hear. Israel was in the war of existence and there was no time to hear the survivors. So it was from both sides.
As for me, I've just finished writing a long book that everything came out of it. The mother's silence, I'm now going through the galleys of it. And I didn't know that my mother was a Holocaust survivor until I was, I think, nine or ten. I mean, I didn't know cautiously.
I was giggling at the ceremonies in the school because what do I have to do with these six million? But the legacy came through very strongly. It took me a lifetime to say my brother and not the child of my mother. These are a phenomenon, a consciousness phenomenon that I try to address in the book, how I didn't hear, how I didn't want to hear, how I survived by not hearing, and yet how I heard what I heard and it shaped me.
Only 20 years after my mother's death did I start researching when my own girls, where my own daughters were big enough. And my husband, who also was born in the end of the war, could do some of the journey with me. It is a lifetime process and I was happy that my relationship to my mother has changed. While she was alive, I was embarrassed to look her straight in the eyes.
And now I see her as a close woman whose lesson I incorporated and whom I can love in a new mode of love after recreating her and giving her life through the work of fiction. You're reading the galleys in your book, so don't you, listeners, what's the name of the book and when will it come out? The name of the book now is Brothers Silence. I hope it will come in English translation.
The French translation is already waiting. And I want also to add that I gave life to all the family that I only knew by names. Now they are people for me. They are alive.
Fiction in a fiction way or in a real way what is memory, what is fiction. The name of the group that I directed was Shresmitted Memory and Fiction, because we have only stories, but these stories make us alive. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because in your book, history, memory, and imagination all play a role. The dialogue you referred to earlier between the two well-known historians, both of whom were survivors themselves, was very powerful.
One emphasizes the centrality of history and public remembrance and the other introduces the idea of a landscape of death that lives in a subconscious. So how do you think we should balance memory as evidence versus memory as metaphor? That's a very complicated question, Renee, and I don't think that there is one answer to it. As for me, I know I can only speak for myself.
I think that when I meet the people who actually perform, he'd consult that ceremony. And when I see at the end that they are changed, that they have touched something in their soul that they did not dare touching, hidden places, and that they receive their parents or the legacy or the history in a broader way. I as an artist is looking for these moments, these tears in the eyes of young and old people. And I feel at that moment that something has changed in these people.
I'm morally working in the realm of emotions. And I think that something that touches you will stay with you. And ideas may come and go. You can stick to ideology, but be decent.
There is life and emotion and your family and the soul circle. And you as a human being, and how do you face this world? And I think that we can learn from the show that there was evil, which was created by men, and there was the heights of the human soul that were enacted by Jews and also by non-Jews. And this is for us to choose.
And when a person in moments of truth stands in front of that, the choice is given. And I hope the choice is for the positive part. We have tears of fear, tears of shock, but we also have tears in our eyes when we face human dignity. And this is what I'm looking for.
Well, you mentioned HitKansu a couple of times. And tell us about the ritual of HitKansu. In your chapter about it, you critique both the traditional religious rituals of memory as well as secular commemoration. So how is HitKansu different?
And what is it? Collaborate, please. I was influenced by the state of Bessar, where we speak about the slavery in Egypt, but most of it is the power of the exodus, of going out from it. And in that sense, we remind in the its consult, actually, as a play for the audience.
So we say that we are here, and every group does it in a different way. And we say that we remember the world, which was before, that usually is passed very quickly in this commemoration. The life, the full life, the rich life. And in all the diaspora and in all places where Jews lived, it's so colorful.
So we don't have a ceremony where we remember the different communities. And Yomoshua is also a celebration of life. And of course, we go into the destruction and and willament. In it, there is parts of the official ceremonies and of the religious ceremonies.
I'm not against them, but we somehow englobe them. So people can light a candle, say, Khadish, privately in many ways. And then there is a chapter about evil. And it's interesting to say that when the consult was translated into English and it can be found on the web, the American partners came back to the table.
And we say, no, but evil is inside any man. And now after these terrible war of two years, we see that we can also commit horrible acts and there are human beings. And we have to remember that evil in us and fight against it. Yet then the most important part is the ways that people were facing it.
And we enumerate many, many things, the uprise in the ghettos, but also at the hills soon and lighting candles in the women's mark in Auschwitz and we called Appelfeld and Frieden there. And then people somehow see that inside the camps, not what you visit in the Museum of Auschwitz, only the relics, but inside the camps there was a rich life on the brink of death. And the last part is the power of the just among the nations and who endangers their families themselves without any direct interest, but they saved people and the heroism of the uprooted who made the ways either to the Aspera or many of them to Israel and started a new life. That's a huge power.
And the last part of it is the question, how shall we remember responsibly? And each year, it changes. The COVID had another edge to eat the war in the Ukraine. And for sure now, incorporating it, the voices of the people from the settlements near Gaza or from those who were kidnapped or from those who were dead.
And the heroism which is now among us is the power that we can identify with. And people come out of that in pursuit, uplifted and not crushed. And uplifting gives you power to go. Absolutely.
You mentioned Aaron Applefeld. And I just want to give him a little more space, especially since the book's title comes from that very moving interview with him. Everything was death, but within it, there was a lot of love. Tell us more about what he really meant by that.
I want to be felt that I was a child during the Holocaust and in his huge body of work, he goes into this frontier between Jews and Christians in Europe and portrays it. And voices out the human light in different circumstances. Each book shows it in a different way. There is a book that came now as a movie, the Rub of Mariana, who is about a prostitute who holds in her room a Jewish child and saves him.
And you learn about that woman and about her biography and about the huge heart that she has. And there is another book that speaks about a group that is hiding in the swamps, trying to fight the Nazis, but they are learning boomer and they are learning chasidism. So in all these books, Aron, who I had the chance of being a close friend of him, was a teacher. Like one of the great teachers of Judaism, what is the human heart?
How is it functioning and in shades which he describes any moments of this blinding light? And that's what he said to us when he came, that inside the power to write comes not from the visions of death and betrayal, but from the visions of love and humankind. It's just so touching. I practically cried when I read that chapter.
There have been a lot of criticism of Holocaust education in America in particular, in probably in other Western countries, in light of the alarming rise of anti-Semitism now, especially since October 7th. In what ways do you hope your research and this book will help shape public memory and show education moving forward? I think Holocaust education was mainly based on testimonies of survivors and of stories, or random stories, evil and death caps. It was important to tell because the Nazis tried to hide everything and things were not known.
So it was a trap because you had to tell about what happened. That the sacrifice edge to it fell into ears that were ready to hear it of the Western world. And more and more that sacrifice and the victimhood became sacred. And we have seen the shift of the role of the victim from the Jews to the Palestinians.
And that's the burst of anti-Semitism today in the world, is the expression of that shift that happened slowly, but it burst out now. That's a trap which I don't want to criticize, but it is embedded. I think that what was missing in that legacy and the joy of being accepted immediately was camouflageing it. Was the real voice of the survivors like my mother or her mates or her ultra-autodox women who survived with her the human courage and the human dignity, the human ability to take the fate in the hands, to choose what is your position.
And this is something which was missing from Holocaust or as an accent from the Holocaust education. I think that we are now in a crossroad when victimhood is taken from us and even the term genocide which was coined for the Neuromberic trials is now used against Israel because that's a substitution mode which is very old and we won't go into it. It's part of the theology and part of the theology that enters the non-religious world unconsciously. If we, as the German pro-curator told me, if the, and I was very moved, if the voice of the survivors of choosing life, not going into a revenge, turning the page saying my revenge is creating a family, choosing life, building a country, contributing to science, contributing to literature, if this sound of this voice would have been heard, we will be in another place.
And I think that in that book that we have just published, but there was love shaping the memory of the Shoah, we suggest that. We suggest giving up the role of the sacrifice, the role of the victim and listening to the human dignity and to the human greatness facing evil in different circumstances. And finally, Michel, how has broader Jewish community in Israel and in the diaspora responded to your work and to the new ceremony or ritual that you created? I think that the book was received by those who have access to it and now it's an open access book in the greater site.
I think that the book will have his way and will touch many people. As for the ceremony that was vehicleed by the Shalom Hartmann Institute for the last 10 years, I can only testify that it was translated to English, as I say, to French, to Russian. I met with many German groups. I spoke in Greece.
And all over the place, people were moved and could feel that there is a future of the memory in a constructive and luminous way. The book is But There Was Love, The Shaping the Memory of the Shoah. It's a powerful work, Michel. Thanks for sharing it with us today.
Thank you, René, for being able to speak. And thanks to our researcher, Bela Pasikov.