This past weekend I reread After, a memoir by American artist, writer and close friend Mindy Weisel, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. It is almost a scrap book with pictures of handwritten notes, photographs and her father’s registration sheet at Bergen-Belsen, the then displaced persons camp. But most prominently the book features Mindy’s artistic work that illustrates her creative process, the painful road from visually mourning her parents’ past to celebrating life. Mindy’s calling has been a search for beauty, in her art, her life, and the world around her. It is the healing quality of beauty she pursues and shares with us in her writing and her art. Children carry their parents’ trauma. Mindy even carries it in her passport. Her birthplace is listed as Bergen-Belsen where she was born in 1947 to two survivors, distant cousins who met there.
My weekend reading coincides with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. The horrified soldiers found about 8,000 starved, sick prisoners left behind by their torturers. At least 1.1 million Jews, Sinti, Roma and many others had been murdered there.
Few of the survivors are left to attend the annual commemorative events at Auschwitz. Each year the group is getting smaller because we are losing them, the generation that has been bearing witness for eight decades. This has consequences.
On January 23, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) released the first-ever, eight-country Index on Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness. The survey is based on interviews with about 1,000 adults (aged 18 and over) in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania. The findings are troubling:
- In the U.S., more than two-thirds (76%) of all adults surveyed believe something like the Holocaust could happen again today. This sentiment is echoed in the U.K. (69%), France (63%), Austria (62%), Germany (61%), Poland (54%), Hungary (52%), and Romania (44%).
- 48% of Americans and one-quarter of adults in the U.K., France, and Romania cannot name a single concentration camp or ghetto.
Young adults (ages 18-29)
- indicated that they had not heard, or were not sure if they had heard, of the Holocaust (Shoah): France (46%), Romania (15%), Austria (14%) and Germany (12%);
- are more likely to believe that the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust has been exaggerated;
- report that Holocaust denial or distortion is most seen on Facebook, X (Twitter), TikTok, and Instagram.
While these findings are disturbing, there is a silver lining. Baseline Holocaust awareness is generally high across most countries surveyed. Up to 93% of adults in all eight countries believe it is important to continue teaching about the Holocaust, in part so it does not happen again. And yet, authoritarian tendencies coupled with anti-Semitism are emerging in all these democratic countries, and right-wing political movements are gaining traction.
Three weeks before the national elections, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) runs at 20% in national polls, in second place after the Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Several AfD regional chapters have been “proven right-wing extremist” and anti-constitutional. Co-party chair Alice Weidel invited Billionaire Elon Musk to join a recent party election campaign event via video. She praised Republicans in the U.S. for making America great again, and pledged to make Germany great again, as well. Musk, who had only recently been on a podcast with Weidel, felt compelled to comment on German history and culture: “[C]hildren should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents.” . . . . “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that,” he said.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Federal President of Germany, would most certainly disagree. In his video message in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day he stated: “The greatest danger to all of us comes from forgetting. About how we no longer remember what we do to each other when we tolerate anti-Semitism and racism in our midst.”
So what can we do now that the generation of witnesses to the atrocities of the Nazi regime are dying? How can we keep memory alive beyond monuments, Stolpersteine and exhibitions? Will the children and grandchildren of the survivors take up the burden and continue the work of their parents, uncles and aunts who visited schools, reached out to the young? Can we expect them to tell their relatives’ stories? Or should they tell their own because they are inextricably linked?
As Mindy Weisel writes in After:
“It’s not in me to tell the story of how unbearable my mother’s life in Auschwitz was. I was born into inherited trauma. I can only write of my experience, my own first-hand trauma, being raised in a survivor’s family. Yet, I not only witnessed the heartache of survivors, I witnessed untold strength. Indescribable courage. I witnessed creation: creating a life out of shards, so few, they could not fill a thimble.”
The next best thing to inviting time witnesses is storytelling. In Berlin, history in grades 6 to 10 is taught only one hour per week, and there is so much to cover. Many teachers include Holocaust literature in language classes such as German and English, but schedules are tight. Longer texts are usually not read anymore in the classroom, but there is exciting material out there that students can relate to. I’m thinking of Amy Kurzweil’s “Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir“, a coming-of-age story of a young Jewish artist. The author and illustrator, grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, celebrates her grandmother’s life with humor and compassion reminding us that all the victims had a life before the Holocaust, and a few built a new one afterwards.
One of the most moving programs I organized with my colleagues at the U.S. Consulate General Leipzig was connecting a group of young writers in Halle with New York writer and playwright Peter Wortsman. As part of their “Tagebuch der Gefühle” Project (Diary of Emotions), this diverse group goes on trips together, visits memorial sites, former concentration camps such as Auschwitz, and records their impressions of encountering Germany’s Jewish past and present. They call themselves the new time witnesses. Peter, son of Jewish Austrian parents who escaped almost certain death, spoke for hours with this group in German, colored by Viennese melodies. Although his work is not easily accessible because trauma is ever present, the young people loved talking about his writing, his history and their own projects. A deep connection was formed that day.
There is something we all can do to combat anti-Semitism, if ever so small. We can recommend a book, visit a Synagogue for the first time, seek friendships and speak up when we see injustice. We can celebrate the beauty of humanity, as Mindy Weisel does, in our lives and our work and in a democratic Germany or America that does not need to be made great – again….
Nie wieder ist jetzt…(Never again is now).
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Notes
After. The Obligation of Beauty. A Memoir by Mindy Weisel. With an Afterward by Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat (London 2021)
Joachim Käppner, “Erinnern, immer,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (Jan. 27, 2025)
Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) first-ever, eight-country Index on Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-afd-to-be-classified-a-right-wing-extremist-group/a-68495809 (March 11, 2023)
https://stadtmuseumhalle.de/tagebuch-der-gefuehle
Also, see Weisel, Mindy. “Memorial Candles: Beauty as Consolation.” American Studies Journal 55 (2011). Web. 29 Jan. 2025. DOI 10.18422/55-08.
