OMG, my first comment! My meta comments do that to me too.
I know what you mean that it feels strange to talk about the Holocaust, when my grandparents and great-grandparents were already in the US when it happened, and the only thing it did to me personally was wipe out a bunch of cousins I have obviously never met still living in Austria and Germany, and even then, because we're Irish, Swedish, Austrian, German Jews, as opposed to Jews whose whole family were in Nazi controlled territory, my extended family came out of it relatively intact. It makes me wonder why in some way I get to own the Holocaust. Like you, that answer is in the way it marks the sudden realization that we live at the mercy of the majority, and that when my grandmother was a little girl, people died because they were like me.
There's a preface to the edition of Elie Wiesel's Night that I read, that I haven't managed to track down where the man, his first editor, I think, talks about how the Holocaust was like the Crucifixion in tragedy, only for the Jews, and how sad that the Jews had to go through something like that too. Only if you're freaking disturbed!
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-08-13 02:32 pm (UTC)I know what you mean that it feels strange to talk about the Holocaust, when my grandparents and great-grandparents were already in the US when it happened, and the only thing it did to me personally was wipe out a bunch of cousins I have obviously never met still living in Austria and Germany, and even then, because we're Irish, Swedish, Austrian, German Jews, as opposed to Jews whose whole family were in Nazi controlled territory, my extended family came out of it relatively intact. It makes me wonder why in some way I get to own the Holocaust. Like you, that answer is in the way it marks the sudden realization that we live at the mercy of the majority, and that when my grandmother was a little girl, people died because they were like me.
There's a preface to the edition of Elie Wiesel's Night that I read, that I haven't managed to track down where the man, his first editor, I think, talks about how the Holocaust was like the Crucifixion in tragedy, only for the Jews, and how sad that the Jews had to go through something like that too. Only if you're freaking disturbed!