Like most bloggers, I occasionally get spam comments on my posts. I usually don’t mind, and once I’ve ascertained their irrelevance and self-serving nature, I simply delete them. But the subject line of the spam comment I received in my inbox this morning after yesterday’s Tragical History Tour post caught my eye: “Memorial to Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.” This was one of the stops we made in Warsaw on our tour, so I was curious to see what this commenter had to say about it.
It turned out to be a link to an article he wrote 14 years ago about New York City’s failure to build a memorial to the heroes of the uprising. It was exhaustively reported and rather tedious, especially for a non-New Yorker like myself. But my eye always enjoys a good picture, and there was a photograph at the top of the article of the cornerstone laid in 1947 in Riverside Park. The inscription engraved on the cornerstone read thus: “This is the site for the American memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Battle April-May 1943 and to the six million Jews of Europe martyred in the cause of human liberty.”
“Martyred”? “Cause of human liberty?” No wonder that memorial never got built. In the communal yizkor, the slaughtered six million are called martyrs, having died l’kiddush Hashem (sanctifying God’s name). But this doesn’t mean they died for a reason. They were not political organizers, social activists, or freedom fighters. They were men, women, and children with ordinary lives who happened to belong to Am Yisrael and, through no fault of their own, ran afoul of a people with a hatred murderous enough to attempt to eradicate them. Their deaths did not result is greater freedom for anyone else. No one’s life was improved because Jews were gassed and cremated. Quite the opposite, in fact. Their deaths have helped to illustrate why the human race, according to T.H. White, deserves to be called not homo sapiens, but homo ferox.
Anyone stupid enough to misunderstand what REALLY happened in the Shoah has no business trying to build a memorial commemorating it. A memorial whose message is reflected in the inscription above would lead future generations unschooled in history to believe that the Shoah was a good thing, and that the world was a better place for it.
Thank God for small mercies.
Shimshonit 
I suppose that this just makes clear why it is so important to educate people – Jews and non-Jews alike – about the Shoah. It also shows that despite all the information and testimonies we have it isn’t easy.
“Cause of human liberty” is a little ridiculous and as you point out, not true. However, “martyred” is a harder term to complain about in a stone laid before the propagation of the term “genocide” (coined 1943). “Murdered” implies a level of individual attention that wasn’t there on the part of the Nazis — quite the opposite, in fact, given their mass-extermination techniques. “Martyred” is a decent choice if you don’t have “genocide” — it recalls the early Christian martyrs, killed by an oppositional government for their religion (and the government’s concern that Christians were bad citizens). The fine point here is of course that even converting to the government’s official religion wouldn’t have saved the Jews of the Shoah, but Jews are uniquely (I think) bound by a combination of religion and ethnicity that’s hard for a world where the two are separate and the former, fluid, to understand.
Lucretia Borgia,
Indeed. I still want to scream when I see people say, regarding Judaism, “How can a child have any religion? Religion is the person’s personal choice; the most that can be said is that they are the children of Jews.”
Does the above apply to Christianity? Absolutely. To Islam? Maybe. But Judaism, no, a million times no!
http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.com/2009/11/musings-on-jewish-ethnicity.html