Children…

Memories of the Holocaust
Pictured to the right are the remnants of the old Jewish
cemetery in Busk, western Ukraine. Like it, thousands
upon thousands of desolate, overgrown and forgotten
Jewish cemeteries lie scattered all over Europe. A civilisation
created over centuries was obliterated in a matter
of years, taking with it virtually all traces of human
life, memories and its diverse manifestations. The link
between the past and the future, and the generations to
come, was violently severed, abruptly and irrevocably.
Who were the people buried in Busk’s old cemetery, or in
the mass graves nearby? Does anyone remember them?
In recapturing Europe’s lost memory, we are confronted
with a choice. If Busk’s gravestones were to tell
us their stories of a vanished world and what happened
there between 1941 and 1943, would we listen? Or
would we turn away? Or are we like the geese that
strut heedlessly among the mass graves, unable to do
otherwise?
We should not turn away from the gravestones,
pretending they tell us nothing. Nor can we face them
endlessly, ignoring the present and future. We must
find ways to consciously bring with us into the future
that which those stones, documents and witnesses tell
us. Only then will knowledge of the Holocaust and its
memory support us as we craft a present and future in
which Auschwitz can not be repeated.
On the left: Holocaust memorials exist
worldwide. Pictured is Germany’s
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe, inaugurated in central Berlin,
May 2005.
On the right: Across the river Bug is Busk, known before the First
World War as “the Venice of Galicia”. The town was home to a
significant Jewish population. On the slope to the river, below the
cemetery, are 17 mass graves with the remains of about 1,750
Jews, shot by the Germans in 1943. In 2006, a French-Ukrainian
research team examined the site.
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