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Don't isolate the Holocaust

Don't isolate the Holocaust - treating genocide as history denies our visceral involvement

This page is reproduced with permission from the Observer newspaper. For the Web page archive of the original feature, click here.

By Jay Rayner, from the Observer, Sunday June 4, 2000

One summer on a holiday camp for Jewish kids, when I was 12, we were shown the film of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, its hollow-eyed inmates just so much skin and bone amid the corpses of the dead. I was shown similar films during similar holidays when I was 13 and 14, by way of a continuing education in the facts of the Holocaust.

Eventually, when I was 15, I was taken to the site of Dachau concentration camp during a tour of Europe organised by a Jewish youth group (these holidays for Jewish kids could be a little intense at times). I stood amid the huts and the fences and I remembered the images I had seen and I tried to feel something. Sadly, I felt little. I had been exposed to so much so soon that I had somehow become inured to it all.

Time passes. I have grown up and my emotional responses have returned. But I could not help wondering, as I stood on Friday before the carefully realised exhibits of the new £5-million Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, which opens to the public on Wednesday, whether we now run the risk of similarly deadening what should be a visceral response to the darkness of the Holocaust, by our very approach to it.

No one can be against an exhibition of the Holocaust. It would be like declaring an opposition to a cure for cancer. The atrocities we are capable of committing against each other should be marked and, as the survivors begin to die - as memory hands over to history - there is a biological imperative to do so. It matters not at all that the events of the Holocaust occurred outside this country. It is irrelevant that other cities around the world - Paris, Berlin, Washington DC - have already created their own institutions dedicated to the events. It is vital that Britain has a serious resource of its own for the purposes of education.

What's more, this new exhibition has been intelligently conceived. A concerted effort has been made to give the mass of victims back their individuality. Video testimonies of 17 survivors punctuate the narrative as it passes from the prosperity of European Jewry pre-1933 through the Nazi's rise to power, the brutal persecutions of the Jews and eventually the industrial rigour of the Final Solution itself.

Even if the grammar and vocabulary of the exhibition is occasionally familiar - the stacks of shoes, the frayed rags of concentration camp uniforms, those images of the dead at Bergen-Belsen that I remember from my childhood - the impact is not lost. I found the pictures of the starving children of the Warsaw Ghetto almost unbearable, just as they should be; a 35ft model of a portion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, completely bleached of colour, takes the breath away.

But this exhibition does have a major weakness and it lies not in what is there, but what isn't. When the project was first announced back in 1994, the museum said it would include material not just on the genocide of the Jews but also on the killings of Armenians by Turks, and on the mass murders in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. That has not happened. While there is information about the fate of gypsies, gays and the disabled under the Nazis, this is resolutely an exhibition about European Jewry. A separate gallery dedicated to other genocides in the twentieth century opens next year.

David Cesarani, Professor of Twentieth Century Jewish History and Culture at Southampton University, an advisor on the project and one of Britain's most astute scholars of the Holocaust, was among those who argued successfully that the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis should stand alone. It was, he said, unique in terms of the centuries-old Christian anti-Semitic ideology that underpinned it and the industrial might used to carry it out. Doubtless he is right in identifying, in such a precise and academic manner, that which separates the Holocaust from other atrocities.

But this kind of project cannot just be about academic precision. If we emphasise the uniqueness of the Holocaust then we undermine its ability to teach us anything, save that it happened. It rejects any attempt at comparison with subsequent events and an exhibition dedicated to it runs the risk of becoming simply a memorial to the Six Million - not a terrible outcome but much less than a project like this could achieve.

There is, after all, no league table of atrocity. Granted, the murder of one million Rwandan Tutsis in 1994 was not conducted through the industrial means used in the genocide of the Jews 50 years earlier. But does that really mean that there are no direct connections to be made between the two? What troubles me most is that the legions of school children who will be the exhibition's core audience, may simply come away with the impression that the crimes of the Holocaust were something that their great-grandparents' generation were capable of rather than anything that could, in one form or another, be repeated today.

And that is how this kind of history becomes merely an intellectual experience rather than the out-and-out emotional one it should be. Like the 15-year-old I once was, standing in the dusty corridors between the inmates' huts of Dachau, visitors to the exhibition may eventually find themselves intrigued but strangely unengaged. That would be a tragedy in itself.

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