“The salvation of man is through love and in love,” writes Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, in “Man’s Search for Meaning.” I’ve interviewed dozens of survivors, and when asked to come up with lessons, they often alight on the importance of tolerance, understanding and love.
The museum didn’t manufacture their messages. And unlike Anne Frank, they were well aware of how the story ended. The problem is that the people who spoke of love were the survivors themselves. “And I find myself furious being lectured by this exhibition about love ,” Horn writes, “as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor.” Horn claims that in all her readings of Holocaust survivor accounts in Yiddish, she never heard the word “love” - and argues that the exhibit there is an example of how society uses the Holocaust not to tell the truth of Jewish suffering, but to paper over the horror with uplifting lessons. At the conclusion of the exhibit, survivors come on screen and talk about the need for people to love one another. A visit to a for-profit high-tech museum exhibition on the Holocaust drives the point home for her. What do movies, books and National Park gift shops teach us about Native Americans? “People Love Dead Indians” would be a multivolume book.īut Horn seems to assume this is just a Jewish issue. Horn doesn’t stop to consider that mythmaking and meaning-making is what people do in the absence of real knowledge or experience. When Horn recounts her visit to a virtual museum of a destroyed Damascus synagogue – or rereads “The Merchant of Venice,” or visits a bizarre theme park in Harbin, China, memorializing the Jews who once lived there – she returns to the point that Jewish history is often repackaged in a way that is uplifting, leaving out the bloody, brutal end of the story.
But, Horn points out, Frank wrote that line before she was captured and sent to Bergen-Belson, where “she met people who weren’t.” Exhibit A for Horn is Anne Frank, whose story is taught to schoolchildren emphasizing her famous quote about still believing that people are good at heart.
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