During the nation building stage, the Shoah served as a heuristic device to prove the absolute validity of the Zionist prognosis that Israel was the only solution to the "Jewish problem." The lives and memories of the "ordinary" (i.e. non-heroic) victims and survivors were largely disclaimed as an ideological liability; no space was made available in the public sphere to accommodate their tragic ordeals.
In 1963 the ministry of education advised to increase to six the number of hours allocated to the history of the Shoah, placing renewed emphasis on its heroic version as exemplified by the ghetto fighters....The first harbingers of this mind-set came into view in 1967, during the three-week "waiting period" before the Six-Day War, when the Shoah was summoned to validate demands for "war now" and for a "strong man" to lead the nation to victory.
Complain, complain, that's all you've done ever since we lost,If it's not the crucifixion then it's the holocaust.
They will never forgive us for the evil they've done us.
The things I saw beggar description... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were . . . overpowering. . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in [a] position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
In a 1940 New Year message Gauleiter Arthur Greiser said that the only use to be made of the Poles was as slaves for Germany, but for the Jews there was no future.
With about 350,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel at the time and when including also their children and their immediate families, a rough estimate of those directly or indirectly affected by the Holocaust would be approximately one million people. Though only a small percentage of these were assumed to be more vulnerable to mental distress, the population at risk still constituted a large number of individuals who were in need of special mental health services hitherto not provided.
The Holocaust pictures that I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women. We were in elementary school. I remember how embarrassed we were.
I'd become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people's tears unbearable. You might drown in them.
We can only shape a bright future if we are aware of Germany's enduring responsibility for the ultimate betrayal of all civilised values that was the Holocaust.
How is one to speak of such things and not lose one’s mind, and not beat one’s fists against the wall? It is as impossible to speak of them as not to speak of them. Too many corpses loom on our horizon; they weigh on every one of our words, their empty eyes hold us in check. One would have to invent a new vocabulary, a new language to say what no human being has ever said.
Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children. Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.
What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal.
The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened... You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.
At the time of the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust survivors made up approximately one quarter of the population of Israel and were viewed as immigrants who had arrived in the country at the time of its establishment. The Holocaust was referred as a tragic, brutal chapter in the history of European Jewry. But the eye witness accounts heard in the Jerusalem courtroom, transformed the public perception of the survivor community.