12 No. 74 JUSTICE et me begin with the recollection of a Hungarian survivor: The Soviet troops were not far off when an SS officer saw an elderly prisoner spit on the ground. He yelled at him to lie down and lick up his own spit. The old man obeyed and licked it up. I happened to be nearby, wearing a lager clerk’s armband. The officer ordered me to hit the old man. I replied, ‘I humbly report, I am a clerk, not an executioner.’ The officer pulled out his pistol and shouted, ‘I’ll shoot you! What do you think you’re doing?!’ I put my hands in my pockets and, in the same rude tone, said, ‘Shoot! I’ve been in the camp for six years. Do you think I’m afraid of death?’ Theodor Adorno famously observed about Auschwitz, that facing death every second was fearing something worse than death. The above recollection speaks to this: death is nothing compared to what one must endure until the end. And those who survived Auschwitz were condemned — for the rest of their lives and to pass on to future generations — to carry the weight of those experiences, which they believed were more horrific than death. After the liberation, the majority of survivors returned home where they were met with shattered lives. Their families had been broken, their homes ransacked and looted, their synagogues destroyed, and their communities annihilated. They were greeted with averted or hostile gazes, further deepening their sense of loss and alienation. Although they tried to rebuild their lives, they could never escape the trauma and the suffering it caused. As Elie Wiesel poignantly wrote: “The question is not to be OR not to be but to be AND not-to-be.” Remembering Auschwitz presents an almost insoluble paradox. There is a vast sea of academic literature on the Holocaust. Yet in his memoirs, Raul Hilberg—one of the most important Holocaust historians—reflects with deep self-reflection as he recalls a quotation from Jacques Derrida, which he had heard from Claude Lanzmann: “The artist usurps the actuality, substituting a text for a reality that is fast fading.… The words that are thus written take the place of the past; these words, rather than the events themselves, will be remembered.” Thus, the role that Auschwitz plays in historical memory is not simply the result of growing historical knowledge about it. Our understanding of the lived reality of Auschwitz is derived exclusively from the accounts of those who survived it and were acutely aware that the experiences they endured constituted a reality fundamentally inaccessible and unbelievable to those who had not themselves endured it. “The concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality. Not even then or even less so — when we directly experienced it,” wrote Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian writer Imre Kertész. The works of Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Imre Kertész, and others succeeded in transmitting the suffering that survivors carried for the rest of their lives by transforming reality into words we can grasp. Yet it is not they who must grapple with this paradox, but their children, their grandchildren, and all future generations who commemorate something unimaginable for them, something that defies normal understanding today. Painful Beginnings: The Reconstruction of Jewish Communities in Central and Eastern Europe after the Holocaust* András Kovács * International Holocaust Remembrance Day Lecture, The Hague, January 26, 2025. Since 2019, Stichting CHAJ, in collaboration with the Municipality of The Hague and the Embassy of Israel, The Netherlands, has been organizing a lecture at the Peace Palace Academy Building on January 27. This lecture aims to delve into the profound impact of the Holocaust on international law, providing a meaningful platform for commemoration. L
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