When reports of an attack near the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial were fresh and the world was uncertain of the damage’s scale, Jews across the globe absorbed the news, collectively quaking with an amalgam of apprehension and fury.Assuredly, there have long been unyielding and sinister forces at work to deny and distort Holocaust history, but rarely has there been full-scale destruction of physical evidence of the Jews’ greatest trauma. Ultimately, as later reports revealed, the memorial remains intact.What would have happened, though, if the site had been decimated and if, as the Sun’s A.R. Hoffman pointed out in an article last week, false comparisons of the current invasion to the Nazis’ systematic genocide of Jewish Europeans were to continue? What happens when unique annals are paralleled with modern day experiences? What happens when current events are layered upon our history book’s most singular chapters or bombs descend on the very physical sites at which they occurred?What becomes of our stories, of our very identities and destinies? Are they amplified and strengthened or do they recede and warp?Recently, it seems as if there has been an increasing number of troubling incidents of Holocaust recasting, rewriting, or erasure. Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” was banned by an East Tennessee school board, and a Holocaust victim impersonation trend found popularity on TikTok. Just last month, Whoopi Goldberg contended that the Holocaust was “not about race” and subsequently doubled down on the “Late Show,” couching her theory in “inquisitive” terms about how we should properly teach children about Nazi tyranny. And, of course, there was last year’s Southlake School District debacle, in which an administrator advised history instructors to balance their Holocaust education curricula by incorporating “opposing” views. While the Babi Yar memorial site wasn’t razed to the ground, it could have been. And, metaphorically speaking, that sort of effacement has been happening through careless and malicious miseducation since 1945.Following these high profile episodes of Holocaust denial or educational misstep, there tends to be outrage and reaffirmation. And yet, they keep happening. And, as the world marches into its last chapter with living Holocaust survivors, the project of remembering seems ever more tenuous and fragile.When President Zelensky tweeted, “To the world: what is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babi Yar? At least 5 killed. History repeating…,” many, especially Jews, proudly reposted his words.There was an initial sense of approval about the importance being placed on Holocaust remembrance and on Jewish history’s most famous lesson, “Never Again.” Good, many of us thought. People are heeding history’s too-often selectively shrill clarion call.But the horrors that haunt Babi Yar are not the events that threatened it last week. So how do we carefully marshal our memories to protect and advocate for people in the present, while fully preserving the mother narrative? How do we find resonance without revising?We are living in a world hampered by comparison culture. It’s a relative space, one in which every violation is measured against others, amplified or denigrated. How do we see things for what they were, while also seeing them for how they might, in part, reappear? How do we safeguard the incomparable without exploiting it? And is it, really, so wrong to exploit history for the purposes of not repeating it? Traumas are unique and irreplicable, we know. Yet I see familiar suffering and evil in too many places to warrant dismissal of its prior iterations. I can’t help but wonder what Elie Wiesel would say about all of this. In his book, “Witness,” Ariel Burger recalls a lesson during which one student asked Wiesel, in essence, “How can students become custodians of memories that are not their own?”If his advocacy on behalf of Rwandans, Cambodians, and others is any indicator, were he here, Wiesel would press for Ukrainian aid at all costs. He would mobilize his story with “Never Again” as his guiding mission and call on us to be activists. But he would also affirm the importance of our roles as witnesses. Wiesel would impress upon us what he was known to ingrain in the minds of his students. “Listening to a witness makes you a witness.” And a story isn’t a witness’ to rewrite.
