Neily Raymond (2020)
The Fallacy of Glass
Exhibits behind glass are safe. The gun in its cabinet cannot shoot me. The bear that gnarls and looms over the museum guest is long dead, its anger sculpted by a taxidermist. The array of barbed insects beneath their clear ceiling can’t lunge at me with deadly intent. No, they are carefully packaged for the casual observer. I can stroll by, blandly, apathetic if I choose, thinking about what I’ll have for lunch. These displays are polite, appropriate, palatable. They don’t ask anything of the viewer except a moment’s attention.
And so, as I entered the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I did not duck in anticipation of an emotional wrecking ball. I skirted along the side of our procession, a mixed group of young adults who giggled and balked like kid goats. My sock kept slipping down inside my shoe, and my attention was divided between heading off the impending blister and projecting the appropriate solemnity. In my hand was a coarse beige booklet, which I opened as we crammed into the elevator. This card, I read, tells the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust. From the opposite page, an oval-faced young woman smiled at the photographer.
Ruth Warter; Berlin, Germany.
Writing this makes me uncomfortable, because I am ashamed of my naïveté—my innocent assurance that I’d already acknowledged the past with appropriate grace. In Social Studies class, the Holocaust was a subject that would circle repeatedly back like a beaten dog, and we memorized the beast from head to tail-tip. I read Anne Frank’s diary. A novel about the “Rabbits”, women who were part of the group subjected to Nazi medical experiments—their name connoted a distinctive limp from identically infected legs. Nonfiction and historical fiction and biography, from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas to All the Light We Cannot See. And oh, how ludicrous it sounds, but I was proud. Proud of my empathy, proud of the superficial sadness that would string through me as I read of death camps, putrefaction and squalor and the persistent family-torn-apart motif. I understood the Holocaust, I thought, and could put it away on a shelf, where it belonged. Yes, people died, how awful, but humankind had outstripped its baseness, and we were cozied in an enlightened modern age that would never allow such apathy toward suffering.
The exhibit was sequential, so we began in 1933 and ranged through the floors, walking the timeline like a tightrope. Was I moving faster, or was the sick momentum of the events infecting me? Some displays still turn like worms behind my eyes. A staircase of childrens’ artworks, ten-legged dogs and crayon houses, each with the label Killed in Auschwitz. The residents of Ejszyszki photographed in The Tower of Faces—babies bundled for the weather, starched family portraits, sisters sprawled on a hillside—buoyantly unaware of the massacre that would obliterate their community.
I am fortunate that I could be entitled and ignorant. I could believe in the inherent goodness of our species because, in my sheltered world, it had never been concretely questioned. But as I watched the crazed enthusiasm in the faces of Hitler Youth members, with Nazi marches beating subliminally in the background, I came to understand how a little boy could be twisted into heartlessness. I read of Mengele magnanimously giving candy to interned children, then performing experiments on them with righteous conviction. There was a horrifically detailed diorama of a gas chamber, complete with a Nazi officer pouring Zyklon B pellets into a roof vent. And this man would go home that night, kiss his wife, and smile indulgently at his children over dinner, secure in the belief that he had loyally served his state.
And always in my hand, Ruth Warter. Born in Berlin, moved to Southwest Lithuania, a devout Jehovah’s Witness with four children. Ruth loved to read. She worried about her husband, and wheedled her children into doing their Bible studies. And the glass-fronted exhibits that confronted me were no longer safe, because the victims were people. People, people, people, not fictional protagonists whose stories ended with the pages, not pithy little truths about the brutality of the human race, but blood-pumping-through-their-wrists humans. That boy with his head wrenched back, eye color being compared to a card of glass irises? He had an inner life as vivid and grasping as my own. The man in the video clip, submerged in ice water until he died? He participated in those tiny shared moments of humanity: mirroring someone’s yawn unintentionally, or pretending to understand someone after you’ve asked them to repeat themselves a few times. Each individual stripped and writhing in that gas chamber? They were brimming with the carnal desperation to survive, because if they died, their world would end. All any of us have is our perception of the world—the end of a life is the end of a universe. And with a click of finality, this loss bore down on me: passions and quirks and sayings and recipes, unwritten music and unbestowed love and precious, precious consciousness. Six million worlds were extinguished, and countless others mangled into grotesquities.
Before you recoil from the impending cliché, I wasn’t floored that day by some sort of monumental revelation. We spend our lives turning over questions of what it means to be human, to be impermanent. When I die, we ask, will the world remember me? If I am forgotten, does it matter that I lived at all? What do future generations owe to us? And the endless ranks of the deceased—what do we owe to them? On NBC’s The Good Place, Eleanor Shellstrop explains, “All humans are aware of death, so we’re all a little bit sad. All the time. That’s just the deal.” For me, that sadness had always been directed towards my own inevitable end. But I matured, learned, questioned my perceptions, and fine fault-lines began to mar the surface of this egocentric worldview. When I entered the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in a vulnerable state of uncertainty, I could begin to see the scope of this genocide on, not a macro scale, but a deeply personal one. And it hurt, because of its staggering incomprehensibility: like trying to understand the fourth dimension, or the inside of a black hole.
We will never memorialize the victims of the Holocaust as they deserve. We cannot respectfully say that these wrongs have been righted and tie the past up neatly with a bow. People were beaten, tortured, methodically mutilated, and where was the brotherhood of man? People were forgotten, and no amount of goodwill can restore them to us. People were killed, and their final moments were not peaceful or just. They died like a rabbit caught in a snare: frightened and confused at their pain. We must accept that we cannot adequately honor their lives—and try anyway.
My generation is distantly removed from the Holocaust’s memory, tamely examining an event that seems illogical in the context of quotidian life. I can tell you this, because I know how it feels. As the years trickle in, these horrors grow further away, and risk being relegated to the realm of time-rippled myths. We must ensure that the memory of the Holocaust stays raw for future generations: not to prolong the pain, but to render its lessons gratingly fresh. Show them minds like theirs unmade, not in glory, but in stifled barbarity, ditches and humiliating filth.
Show them the danger of a person who believes that their actions are moral. Show them today’s victims of human trafficking, dent-ribbed starving children, domestic abuse and racism and the unswallowable fact that we have not learned. And let them be horrified. Fill them with the need to drown this callousness in an ocean of compassion, an aggressive deluge of love.
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” Elie Wiesel’s phrase is blazed across the cover of the beige booklet I carried from the museum. Ruth Warter survived the Holocaust. Others did not. None should fade into nonmemory. We must bear witness, for these victims lived with the same vital self-ness as you, and I, and the generations that will come after us. Without reopening this wound, letting our children see how real, and red, and so like theirs the blood poured, the Holocaust will become a quiet lump of scar tissue in the world’s collective memory. It is cruel, perhaps, but only with this cruelty can we stop man’s apathy toward man.
Only the knowledge of our capacity for monstrousness can raise a planet of peacekeepers. And to preserve any inkling of hope for the good in humanity, for the simple and kind and pure, we must never place the Holocaust behind glass.