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Feedback Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the author of the well-known autobiographical novel Night, wrote that “only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was; the rest will never know.” As Wiesel saw it, “the witness knew then, as he knows now,” that his experience could not be conveyed or fully comprehended by those who had not been in a concentration camp and had not endured torture and humiliation. The author of the testimony asks: “Others will not know, but will they be able to understand?”
And yet, despite his doubts, Wiesel “simply could not remain silent.” Reflecting on the destruction of European Jewry by the German Nazis, Wiesel concludes that over the years not only the actions but also the aims of the antisemites changed: if at the beginning of their rule the Nazis set themselves the task of “building a society without Jews,” towards the end they wanted “to leave behind a world in which Jews seemed never to have existed at all.” Violence against people — Jewish men, women and children — was accompanied by the destruction of the very memory of this people, their culture, language and religion. For many witnesses, the struggle against the destruction of memory became the purpose of their lives, an act of resistance.
Contemporary antifascists often repeat that “to remember means to resist,” holding events in memory of comrades killed by neo-Nazis. “Memory Is Resistance” is the slogan on the website of members of Memorial who study the history of political repression in the USSR and preserve testimonies of the horrors of the Soviet past.
Memory matters to everyone: both to those who refuse to let themselves or others forget the crimes of the past and the suffering of the victims, and to those who take pride in that past. It is not simply a matter of knowing something — Wiesel was right about that — achieving understanding is much more difficult.
We can see how declared aims and ideological attitudes continue to change in our own time. From “Holocaust denial” — until quite recently, apologists for German nationalism claimed that Jews had not been exterminated and had themselves invented both the camps and the crematoria in order to slander innocent Germans (there were even claims that Jews themselves had organised the mass murder of Jews to spite the Aryans) — to contemporary proposals by Alternative for Germany not to teach about Hitlerism in schools and instead devote more attention to Bismarck. Germany’s far-right politicians are now closer to the cynical attitude: “Here’s your beer, here’s your ham, and what happened yesterday is in the past” (the ever-relevant words of a song by Yuliy Kim).
No one is saying that it did not happen: it did. The only question is how to regard it, how to understand it. The militarist and nationalist Bismarck is, for the AfD, something good, something to take pride in, while schoolchildren need not be told about certain costs of twentieth-century history: enough already, so much has been said about it.
The lavish funeral held in Belgrade with military honours for Ratko Mladić, convicted by the Hague Tribunal of crimes against humanity, is a striking manifestation of the contemporary conflict over memory: for some, the victims and witnesses of crimes matter; for others, what matters is the glorification of war criminals. Everyone wants to remember — but they remember different things and understand the past differently.
Those who are erecting ever more monuments to Stalin in the Russian Federation obviously want to remind people of him, often making no attempt to conceal the fact that Stalinism was terror. They simply like terror and want to put it back on a pedestal. And they are prepared to remember the Gulag as well — not to deny its existence, but to explain it in their own way, interpreting it within the framework of the “inadmissibility of distorting the history of the USSR.” Thus, for example, one can hold an academic conference in a former Soviet camp, highlighting “examples of the extraordinary courage and patriotism of our compatriots, whose military and labour achievements have more than once become a central theme of academic conferences organised for ten years by the Perm-36 Museum-Reserve.”
But telling the history of the Stalinist era as it was seen by those who survived despite the terror, those who neither forgot nor forgave, is treated as extremism. This is why Memorial was banned and the Gulag History Museum in Moscow was closed. It is not memory that is forbidden — it is understanding that is forbidden, precisely what Elie Wiesel and many others sought to achieve through their testimonies.
The struggle to foster an understanding that terror and war crimes are unacceptable does not end even when a verdict has been handed down by the Hague (or Nuremberg) Tribunal. Constant efforts are required not only to prevent people from forgetting, but also to show history — including the most recent history — through the eyes of victims of violence, those who suffered, and surviving witnesses. To show their truth rather than the perpetrator’s version: the perpetrator who does not even conceal what he is doing — who may even take pride in it — but who always has an explanation of his own, most often that he was forced to “strike first,” to assert his right to dominance, and so on.
The perpetrators themselves are also eager to preserve the memory of violence — in military monuments, bas-reliefs and installations. The voices of those who suffered can be heard in their memories, accounts and testimonies, which must be collected and published, as is being done today by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group’s “Voices of War” project and in human rights reports, which bring together the tragic experiences of Ukrainian women and men who have suffered as a result of Russia’s military aggression.
Stephania KULAEVA
First published on the Radio Svoboda blog