Never Shall I Forget
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.
-Elie Wiesel (1958)
This blog is dedicated to all of the men, women and children who were unjustly taken from this world, may all of their memories be a blessing. This poem highlights the feelings post holocaust, the pain the survivors had to live with. Jewish displaced persons faced a mountainous task- how to move on and where that might be.
While the history of anti-Semitism can be traced back to the medieval times and the persecution of Jews who survived the Black Plague, the real war against the Jewish people emerged during Adolf Hitlers reign. Before the start of World War II, around 9.5 million Jewish people lived in Europe. By the time the war ended, the Nazis had killed six million European Jews in concentration camps, ghettos, or in mass executions in what we refer to today as the Holocaust.
Before the Holocaust, and Hitlers determination to eliminate all Jewish persons, there were attempts to relocate German Jews to Palestine. The Haavara Agreement is the first example of a Nazi program of organized Jewish relocation. (Segev 9) What is important to remember that at the same time as these and other forced relocation plans were discussed, Jews were being increasingly marginalized and disenfranchised in Nazi Germany. They were expelled from German civil service and from the professions, their shops and businesses were boycotted and their German citizenship was taken away (Segev 8). The ideology known as Zionism (a person who believes in the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel) became option for many Jews, who were specifically German. As Cohen states in his book In War’s Wake, Zionism became the language of hope for the besieged Jews who remained in Germany (Cohen 3). Segev also states that the solution of relocation appeased both parties, “Nazi’s wanted Jews out of Germany and Zionists wanted them to come to Palestine.”(Segev 9) European Jews felt deeply connected to their homelands, moving to Palestine meant abandoning their nationality as European and adopting a Jewish identity in a new country.
In Avinoam J Patts chapter “living in landsburg, dreaming of deganiah” begins with joyous youth survivors embracing the opportunity of immigrating to Israel, learning Hebrew and developing their farm labor skills. Behind the curtain, the allied forces “weighed the desires of the large Jewish refugee population in Europe. Likewise, the founders of the newly created State of Israel pointed to a clear relationship between the Holocaust and Israel, with survivors actively participating in the founding of the state. (Patt 4) But these survivors were put in a precarious decision, most likely they were alone and had to decide whether or not to return to home or leave for Israel. These decisions fueled the portrayal of Zionism, though the options were already limited. Ultimately, “DP Zionism could succeed because it made sense both on the ideological level and the practical level; without pragmatic solutions to the most pressing needs of the young survivors, it could not have attracted and maintained the membership that it did.”(Patt 15)
Sources:
https://www.hmd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Never-Shall-I-Forget.pdf
A Patt, Living in Landsberg, Dreaming of Deganiah – Jewish Displaced Youths and Zionism after the Holocaust-rescan.PDFA Patt, Living in Landsberg,
Dreaming of Deganiah – Jewish Displaced Youths and Zionism after the Holocaust-rescan.PDF
Gerard Cohen, In War’s Wake, ch. 6).
I really enjoyed the poem in the beginning of this post, it explains the true significance of these horrific events and explains the feelings of the Jewish population during, and after the war. This feeling described in that poem of fear and almost nostalgia connects well with your point of saying that the European Jews did not want to be relocated once again, having to forget what they had gone through in the previous years to adopt this new Jewish national identity that the Zionists craved.
The poem at the beginning is hauntingly beautiful and was the perfect way to start your blogpost. It captures the horrors European Jews suffered, and why so many chose to embrace Zionism. For me personally if I had suffered what they had suffered I would want to go someplace where I could start fresh without constant reminders of suffering. Not that that trauma goes away but being surrounded by the past certainly would not be appealing for many.
Nice explanation of the Holocaust survivors’ embrace of Zionism. I liked when you said, “European Jews felt deeply connected to their homelands, moving to Palestine meant abandoning their nationality as European and adopting a Jewish identity in a new country.” Last semester, I took Modern Germany, in which I learned about how Jewish Germans were tightly connected to and immersed in the communities of non-Jewish Germans before the Nazi period, with many Jews serving in the German military in WWI. You’re right that Germany was the homeland of these people, while Judaism, though still very important to their lives, was only their religion.
I liked the thread of numbers that you used through both your blog as well as your discussion questions. I think you did a good job portraying the reasons why Jewish persons might have wanted to leave their homeland even before the war. I think seeing those reasons begs the question of whether or not it took the Holocaust to build Israel, as you posed in class.
The poem you included is very deep and moving, it truly captures the sorrow of this subject. It would have been extremely difficult to make the decision to leave Europe and emigrate to Palestine, but after losing everything, all decisions for Jewish DPs must have been. If WWII had never happened, one does wonder if Israel would have become the state it is today.
This is another example of you using a poem to start off your post as your artifact. I still think that this example is extremely influential, and I love the ability to be unique and not simply use an image. Overall, I think that you did a good job of being creative and also using your artifact to further the information provided in your post.