This is a lovely personal reflection, Jennifer, at this time of the Yom Ha Shoah. You sensitively step through the importance of making personal and individual the terrible human loss that was the holocaust and, as far as possible to remember your family members who tragically perished. I sometimes wonder about those many in my own family who perished and, at least for me, disappeared without trace during the Second World War and in the turbulence that followed. They live only as names on scraps of paper I retain in draws, they live only as fleeting memories of stories my parents told. I reflect; is this the story of most people? Those millions who originate from West Africa who lost family to hundred of years of slavery, who still bear the name of their slave owner? Those millions of indigenous peoples across the globe whose families were torn apart and who still suffer the consequences of dispossession and systematic murder at the hands of western colonial powers? The millions uprooted today across the Middle East, fleeing attack from western forces and the death and disruption of civil discord? For me, personally, notwithstanding your inspirational and heartfelt words, it is hard to see the efficacy of ‘never again’ amid all this global scale suffering and death. I feel, may be perversely, may be against my self interest, that even the attempt to restore, through memorialising those who perished in my own family, privileges me above the millions whose familial past is forever extinguished. I feel that by refusing to lift the veil over the anonymity of my lost predecessors, I maintain some solidarity with those who can never recover the memory of those whom they have lost. I feel there is virtue in refusing this privilege of memory and leaving my family in the darkness and obscurity of my draw. I don’t denigrate your experience, I’m simply observing that it isn’t a possibility for most of suffering human kind.
“Never Again”
Jennifer Mendelsohn
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