Holocaust Remembrance Day
The price of myth
Holocaust Remembrance Day is one of the most sombre days in the international calendar. For Jews it’s a pretty bleak event. There is no dancing, or drinking of wine, no special foods, not even any chance to atone for past evils – it’s just a reminder of the darkness that hides deep in the soul of mankind.
Non-Jews acknowledge this too, but there is something about the way that the rest of the world commemorates these events that I find profoundly unsettling. The Holocaust is not something that happened to ‘us’, but something that happened to ‘them’. Mixed in with our sympathy, therefore, is an inevitable acknowledgement of differences between us. Which is fine – except that these differences come with all kinds of baggage.
I have written many times about the mythology of World War II, and the archetypal roles that different groups of people play in our collective memory. Inevitably, Jews always play the role of the victim. The Nazis play the corresponding role of the monster that slaughtered them for the sake of a twisted ideology. The rest of us – especially the Brits, the Americans and the other Allies – take on the role of the archetypal hero. It was we who risked our lives to vanquish the beast. Had we not intervened, Hitler would not have stopped until every last European Jew was dead. We fought, we won, and we returned peace and order to the world.
I don’t want to trash this narrative, because it is largely true. But I do want to point out that it has consequences. By thinking in archetypal terms, we are tapping in to a story that is as old as time. It is the story of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster; or the medieval knight who rescues the damsel-in-distress from the dragon. Thus, while most Jews remember only the tragedy of what happened during the war, the rest of us embrace a narrative that is, perversely, rather comforting. It’s nice to think of yourself as a hero. But it is when history becomes comfortable that we begin to lose sight of what really happened 80 years ago.
It is with this in mind that I want to share with you some of the most common myths we have about the end of the war which get in the way of a proper understanding of the Holocaust and its legacy.
