Five books, six candles

MARK BAKER

THEY buried another Buchenwalder on Sunday afternoon, two hours before the sun set on the last two days of Pesach. In exactly one week, Andre Zelig would have celebrated his rebirth, the day when American soldiers liberated Buchenwald -— April 11.

The few remaining survivors of that camp contemplated this fact as they shuffled out of the cemetery. They made the calculation: 21 gone now; that leaves only 22 of us.

This week, six of those 22 Buchenwald boys, who made their way to Australia after the war, will be lighting candles at the Yom Hashoah ceremony in Melbourne, my father among them.

This year, marking their liberation coincides with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, chosen as the date to commemorate the Holocaust experience. These survivors, the living remnants of the murdered, have spent their entire lives resisting the Holocaust.

Their uprising occurs each year in the form of an annual Buchenwald ball, an event of monumental significance based on the most profound of human paradoxes. How to live life after death? These old boys will show you. There is no commemoration without celebration, no memory of death without regeneration of life. They are icons of Jewish history, a universal paradigm of biblical proportions.

Indeed, if one were to write the history of these survivors, and do justice to the transformative scope of their collective stories, one might choose as a frame of reference the biblical structure of our own scriptural tradition.

Bereshit: The genesis of the survivor experience lies in a world in which human beings played the role of God, selecting who shall live and die with a single wave of a finger.

The survivors rose as the dry bones of a prophetic vision, some of them literally from the mass graves of Eastern Europe, where their bodies lay breathlessly among the corpses. “Ich lebe”, they must have cried, “I live”.

They came from everywhere — camps and destroyed ghettos, forests and convents, holes where they had hidden, the icy extremes of Siberia. In the beginning there was no word to describe this chaos and void; the orderly structuring of human experience came later when the event was named “Holocaust”, exactly as Adam was instructed to do when he encountered unfamiliar things for the first time.

Shemot, the Book of Names: In 1945, the Jewish Agency prepared lists of names, which were used by the survivors to identify whether anyone from their family had survived.

One can barely imagine that moment of reckoning, when the living confronted¬† all that had been lost and destroyed.¬† They are truly the she’erit pleita — remnant leftovers — of a total genocide.

But Shemot is also the Book of Exodus, and focuses on the existential question asked in Yiddish: “Voahin zol ich gayn?” — “Where do I go?”

In the beginning, wrote a group of survivors from Buchenwald, we went to the forests and lay flat on the earth. We looked up at the stars and decided to begin a new life up there, away from our planet. They named themselves Apollo, Venus, Minerva. Eventually they came down, and immigrated to Israel, where they established Kibbutz Buchenwald, another of those inspirational oxymorons.

The more than 250,000 survivors of the Shoah crisscrossed Europe, some of them returning to their homes from which they were driven away by fear and violence. Eventually, they converged in the displaced persons camps.

Most migrated to Israel, spurred by the hope of Zionism to build a new Jewish homeland apart from the societies that had murdered and betrayed centuries of coexistence.

About 30,000 of these survivors chose, or were chosen by chance, to migrate to Australia, the planet closest to the stars. Crossing oceans to a new world, they began a new life.

Vayikra, the Book of Sacrifices: “Oy”, our parents and grandparents will tell us, “what didn’t we do for you?” It’s a fair rhetorical question. Most importantly, the survivors sacrificed their haunted memories in order to affirm life and build like gods ex nihilo, from

nothing.

They created children, and through them, a whole cluster of tribes who have ensured that the ruptures of the Holocaust will not produce a permanent abyss. The book of Vayikra is about the constitution of a holy people ruled by its own laws, rituals and culture. The survivor generation has bequeathed that culture to future generations, an ethos of sanctification in the face of desecration, life over death, blessing above curse.

Bamidbar: Now, for more than 40 years, they have wandered through the fourth scroll, Bamidbar, contributing to cultivating the desert landscape of Australia with the variegated colour of multiculturalism. At the Monash University Aftermath Conference on Survivors of Australia, the story of this encounter with a strange land was told.

The survivors over the span of a lifetime advanced community institutions — schools, synagogues, welfare organisations and museums.

The survivors built family economies, many of them sewing their way through life, and opening the possibility for their children to become professionals.

If Australia is the Lucky Country, the misfortune of survivors added fortune to this country — materially, culturally, morally.

The survivors are the witnesses of history’s nadir — they saw what happens when creation becomes cremation, and defied the current by recreating through their wanderings.

Devarim, the Book of Words: As yet another visit to the cemetery on Sunday showed, we are now in the Book of Devarim. It is the Book of Words, a life lived and pondered. The river that survivors are approaching is filled with both ashes and flora. New generations, like my own, will have to cross this river for them. We take with us their accented stories and their diverse legacies.

Only last week I attended a conference of the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, where I glimpsed how technology is about to change the way the 55,000 testimonies of this visual archive will be disseminated.

Before long, the Scroll of the Survivors will be delivered to every computer, reaching audiences across the globe.

This is the future of memory, yet it is up to us to take responsibility for giving the memories shape, so that they will be told as the survivors would wish it, while leaving room for the words of new generations to expand on the story.

Mark Baker is director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University.