Thursday, March 31, 2016

More questions than answers about the Holocaust

My next talk at the Holocaust Centre is to a Probus group, a group of elderly, (though most much younger than I) probably predominantly women. Talking to students I often start with quoting the title of a picture book that my children had more than thirty years ago: 'Why are there more questions than answers, Grandpa?' and say that I hope that they will go away with more questions than answers. The first question I might put to the Probus groups is why do they care about the Holocaust, seventy years after the event that hardly touched the lives of most of them. I might suggest that the questions are not about history, they can read a library full of books about the Holocaust as a historical event. The questions are about themselves, how they would act in circumstances such as the Holocaust, act as victims, perpetrators or bystanders. They might ask questions about their parents' generation, who would have been, by and large, disinterested bystanders. And they might ask questions about present day issues, Donald Trump, the demagogue, the know little populist, and Bernie Sanders, the eternal Jews, who asks difficult questions about social justice. Donald Trump's politics, and Bernie Sanders's might have faint echoes in New Zealand politics, so the questions are not just about American politics, and the questions could well be about Germany in the 1930s and 1920s, demagoguery, injustice, prejudice, and the hatred of Jews as the answer to questions that have no easy answers. I myself struggle with the question of why people care about the Holocaust, when historical events much closer to home, such as the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s struggle to find a place in the New Zealand school curriculum, yet people care, and it is my duty to engage with them and challenge them to think.

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