“I Just Feel Human”

Bringing Mindfulness and Universality to Remembrance

Yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I walked past a war monument that always evokes many thoughts about what we mean by remembrance. Living for a few months in a part of the world where Latin-based languages are spoken has called my attention to the roots of certain words and how they might help us to recalibrate our understanding. “Memor,” meaning “mindful,” is one of the Latin roots for remembrance that offers this possibility.

---

In the Place de la Liberté, the square around the corner from the 200-year-old village house in the small French-Catalan town of Céret where I have been living since mid-December, there is a striking monument I pass by each day on my way up the hill to see whether any snow has fallen in the surrounding mountains that could help end the two-year drought that has plagued southwestern France.

Atop the monument is the statue of a mother in a flowing robe. She sits on a pedestal resting her head on the back side of her hand, her arm leaning on her knee, in mourning and remembrance. Underneath her, engraved in stone are the words, “The Town of Céret, To its children who died for France.” The names of those sons who made the ultimate sacrifice during 1914-18 follow. The list is so long that it takes up all four sides of the square column beneath her.  No one expected to have to screw plaques onto the base of the pedestal with the names of those who fell in a second world war etched into them. And yet, there they are declaring the terrible fate of another generation of sons and making a mockery of the idea of a war to end all wars.

One morning, a few days before Christmas, a crowd gathered outside the monument for a ceremony. In the front row were old men with medals pinned to their blazers and sashes hung diagonally over their shoulders, supported by their grey-haired children and grown grandchildren. Representatives from the military in tall hats stood opposite them and saluted while the mayor, a middle-aged woman, leafed through the pages of her speech at the podium, concerned to get everything right. A three-man band with shiny polished brass instruments waited for the signal to play.

I was an outsider, and yet somehow, I wasn’t. The world wars affected me and my family deeply. But I was from “the other side,” the granddaughter of an SS man, a descendant of the enemy. I stopped and stood on the fringes of the crowd, though it is hard to be inconspicuous when you are as tall as I am and have that self-conscious look of the foreigner about you. Some looked quietly over their shoulders and noticed me standing there between two parked cars but then quickly turned their attention back to greeting family and friends.

From where I stood, I could see the statue and its engraved pedestal straight through the open cast iron gate.  Today, it was flanked by two French flags. Seeing them dangling there made me feel desperate. In today’s volatile socio-political landscape, such ceremonies can so easily be perverted to feed the very same negative brand of nationalism that fueled the world wars.

And yet, all decency behooves us to remember these fallen sons, whose youth war so often stole. The question is, how can we do this without dismissing the complexities of history? For instance, the Vichy Regime, a puppet of the Third Reich, deported approximately 75000 Jews living in France between 1940-44. Though Céret was in free France, to which many fled during the German occupation, the monument itself, the military presence, the flags, and perhaps even the statue of the mother itself were evocative national symbols.

Wherever you live, if you are mindful, the world wars will, at the very least, face you with uncomfortable dualities.  If ceremonies of remembrance are to have any value for peace, they must be able to hold these many jarring realities all at the same time. People must be able to mourn their loss without traumatizing future generations and turning them into permanent victims, the stuff of aggressive nationalism and the seed of genocide.

Looking at the names etched into the monument, I asked myself how these men would have wanted us to remember their experience. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel based on the author’s experience of the trenches during WWI, provides some answers. There is an abiding sense of meaninglessness in war which, to paraphrase Remarque, demands that young men who are just beginning to live and love the world are required to shoot it to pieces. But there is also something else, something we can build upon, and that is a sense of the universality of human experience that transcends flags. All men are made of the same flesh and blood, suffer the same, and most regret it when they do not help their fellow man, even if he or she is on the other side. Little wonder that the Nazis banned Remarque’s book. It is precisely this universality that remembrance must turn its attention to if it is to be of value for improving the human condition.

A memorable book I recently read, entitled A Reconciliation with Evil, an account of the life of my friend, Leon Weintraub, soon to be published in English (I’ll let you know when it’s available) and Swedish, alongside the existing Polish and German editions, points us squarely in this direction. Today, a spritely 98-year-old, Leon survived the poverty of his beginnings in Poland, several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and antisemitic persecution in his native Poland during the late 1960s. If there is anyone I know who has reasons to feel victimized and to become hardened in the shell of an identity, it is Leon. Yet, in his book, he dismisses these tendencies and says: “I just feel human.”

Maybe a professional life devoted to maternal health, for which he recently received the highest honor Germany can bestow upon a physician, made reaching such an enlightened conclusion more likely. People look all the same inside, Leon often says. Even when we have spoken of the most difficult things, as we once did in conversation on German public television, I am reminded of his long, warm embrace which places what is between us as humans above all else. It is a form of wisdom gained through the experience of what, for most of us, is unimaginable suffering and that we can only access through the act of remembrance. This means being mindful of the past, its devilish multifacetedness, and taking care never to lose sight of what binds us.

I do not know what was said during the small ceremony in the Place de la Liberté on that day. My French skills are too meager.  All one can hope for is that the mayor of Céret did justice to history and the sons of Céret, who are our sons too.

In closing, here is a short poem written out of the sense of unease from which this article emerged, but that also yearns for the universality in which it landed.

Hymn for Faded Flags

Flags billow and fade

Into one another,

Colors bleeding

In the winds of war.

In peacetime, they hang limp,

Separate,

The colors keeping to themselves

In the dense silence before a new fight.

A craggy, ancient language

Bursts from a man’s chest,

Haunting in its tenderness

From which the angry passion of belonging rises.

Mothers’ warm tears trickle through time

And the dank crevices of stone walls

Into the tranquil sea,

The final resting place of children.

Other thought-provoking pieces concerning the consequences of what and how we remember:

Letter to a Pig - A Short Film by Tal Kantor | Short of the Week

A presentation I did last year for Holocaust Remembrance Week at the Office of the EU Commission in Stockholm in conversation with U.N. whistle-blower, Inga-Britt Ahlenius: