Warsaw and Gaza

Anytime you put up a picture of the holocaust it's going to get a reaction, most of the time, someone will feel offended, hurt whatever. Usually these reaction seem to be ingrained in the observer, as if they might have been programmed to be angry just because the holocaust is such a sensitive subject. As a humanist, I think the Israeli government has perpetrated injustices and inhumanities against innocent civilians, and that makes me upset. But to be completely honest, as thegrand daughter of two holocaust survivors, nothing invokes the sorrow I am reminded of when I look at pictures of the holocaust, and I know that is not the rational part of my brain talking. Do I think the suffering of a little Jewish girl in 1944 is any less horrific than the suffering of a little Palestinian girl? Hell to the no. The rational, mature, objective part of my brain knows that.

But then again, I am human. I am second generation. This is part of my identity . And when I see pictures of the holocaust, it invokes a feeling in me that is hard to describe. It's like a hole has opened up in the ground and is sucking all the happiness and hope and goodness in the world down into the darkness, and is dragging me along with it. It makes me feel sick inside, it makes me think of my family and my grandmother who could never speak about what happened to her, it makes me ask myself shouldn't it have been me?

It is, to be cliche, a survivor's guilt that is impossible to convey to those who have not experienced the trauma of listening to the memories of your family, hearing about how your great grandmother and grandfather, who you only know about through listening to stories with fishnet sized holes in them, through one photograph, were gassed in chambers. And then you (me) actually go to those chambers, well, what are now pretty much holes int he ground with wooden ruins, and you see next to a black lake nearby, and when you walk over to it, you notice that on the ground there are little small white pieces of something, everywhere, little white porous pieces of something.

And you (me) know what it is, but you don't want to admit it, recognize it, believe it, because then you have to actually process that these little, white, tiny porous things are actually pebble sized shards of bones. And you have to admit that this garbage, as people saw it, was once people, that you are, quite possibly and maybe even probably, quite LITERALLY standing on the unmarked grave of your great grandmother and grandfather, who instead of having a burial with respect and dignity and for god's sake one fucking ounce of recognition of their existance as humans, are instead little white pieces of bones, garbage, as it was, from the crematoria, scattered in the dirt next to a black lake filled with ashes of more dead people, more relatives maybe, and nearby lies the neighboring gas chamber where no one knew they died. It's so personal that to combine pictures from both areas over lapped and fading into one another, at once conveys your feelings of anger and frustration at human suffering, which I believe I understand. Yet, and at the same time, it shows a complete disconnect to the events themselves- you have taken these pictures of children, anger, humiliation and the baseness of humanity and photoshopped them, saturated them, adjusted their color tone, put text over them, and created a neat politcal message, and there you go- you've taken the horror and sadness from both sides and made it streamlined, digestable, something we can think about for a while and then forget, or move on, or look at another piece of pretty art. I think for people who have had a personal connection to atrocities like these- be they, Palestinian, Jewish, Gay, Gypsy, Polish, Shia, Sunni, Kurdish, Druze, whatever- the anger they (i.e.maybe someone like greenviews, mybe even myself) feel at their core is not that you can't compare the two, because in the end, a life is a life- it doesn't matter who is doing the killing, de-humanizing or torturing, a life is a life- it's that these pictures actually mean more to some people than can be put into words or photo shopped.