ABSTRACT
From a Jewish perspective, loss is inseparable from any discussion of the Holocaust. Invited, as we so often are these days through memorials, museums, and archive film, to contemplate the faces of those packed into ghettoes, deported, or simply shot; the carefully-displayed remnants of artefacts once produced by living communities; or the laboriously inscribed names of thousands of murdered Jews, as on the walls of the Pinkasova Synagogue in Prague; there is simply no escaping an equation of Nazi rule with loss—the loss of individuals, of whole families, communities, institutions, of virtually everything that formed the substance of Jewish life in much of Europe prior to 1939. From her particular experience of working intensively with Holocaust survivors, Diana observed that “it would be really weird if we didn’t start crying”; and hers is simply one of many voices in which “ordinary” Jews speak of the oblique feelings of loss which thoughts of the Holocaust summon up: BERNICE
“Loss … . I do grieve … I do grieve about the loss of … when you think of how many … how many people there would be now.”
EDWARD“I do feel loss, […] a sense of loss. […] I’ve a sadness. […] I do feel sadness about the whole thing.”
28RUTH“It’s difficult for me to know how to answer this, but I suppose if I’m thinking about the Holocaust, […] yes, I think grief and sadness.”
GIDEON“The first thing that happens, which didn’t used to happen, is that I get very upset. When I read […’s] account of his experience, it brings tears to my eyes.”
In many respects, loss is not only an unavoidable material fact of the Holocaust, but a central component of our psychological relationship to it. Almost for this very reason, it is enormously complicated to explore, not least because the sense of loss and the losses themselves go in so many different directions. People become “lost for words” in trying to grapple with their confusion and sheer incomprehension as to “how it happened”. Those who know or have known survivors to any degree pick up on the almost inexpressible grief at lost families, lost friends, lost homes, lost pasts innocent of Holocaust experience, which those individuals carry throughout their lives. A Jewish colleague whose mother successfully escaped to Britain from Germany in the 1930s refers to her mother’s unspoken anguish at the loss of her “German-ness”. Yiddish writer Kadya Molodowsky, whose 1946 book of poetry Der meylekh Dovid aleyn is geblibn was produced in the immediate knowledge of what had happened in Europe, thought of her book as “a tombstone for a life […] vanished”, a theme of painful finality echoed by many subsequent writers close in family connection or personal history to the geographies of the Holocaust (quoted in Valencia, 2006, p. 13).