Auschwitz - documentary by Steven Spielberg, narrated by Meryl Streep

 This documentary had its premiere 27.1.2015, in the presence of 300 Holocaust survivors in Auschwitz, marking 70 years for liberating of the concentration camp.

The Red Cross visits Theresienstadt, 70 years ago

Pastoral Theresienstadt

The infamous Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt took place 

June 23, 1944, that is, 70 years ago

In the Coffee House - Joe Spier 

Theresienstadt was established as a 'model ghetto', "in order to save face in regards to the outside world" (Eichmann). The first deportation to the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto too place Nov. 24, 1941.

While the Jews in Theresienstadt gave manifestation to the height of spiritual survival in the shadow of evil, it was, and was meant to be a hoax from the beginning.

The perversity of deception in the service of evil compounded into the dust of the extermination camps, but on the way, “to the East,” as the Nazis deceptively called the transports to the death camps, Theresienstadt served as a model of deception.

The Red Cross visited the 'town' on June 23, 1944, prior to which the Nazis intensified deportations, and the ghetto was "beautified." Some inmates were dressed up and told to stand at strategic places along the carefully designated route. Shop windows along the route were filled with goods for the day, and the day's abundance in the candy shop window made life in Terezin seem sweet.

The day of the visit, the orchestra stage at the town square

Children playing - also the day of the visit 

Not the day of the visit 

The Red Cross reported dryly that while war time conditions made all life difficult, life at Terezin was acceptable given all of the pressures. The Red Cross concluded that the Jews were being

treated

all right.

Inmates in Theresienstadt - also not the day of the visit 

Approximately 158,000 Jews were brought to Theresienstadt. Approximately 90,000 were transported onwards to the extermination camps, of whom about 4,800 survived. About 35,500 died of hunger and illness in the ghetto (among them my great-grandmother).

Of the 12,121 children (born 1928 and later) brought to Theresienstadt, 9,001 were sent to the death camps. 325 survived.

When Helen Deutsch, the psychoanalyst who had left Vienna for the United States in 1935, wrote her important 1942 paper “Some forms of emotional disturbance and their relationship to schizophrenia,” introducing the concept of the as-if personality, the poet Leo Strauss wrote, in Theresienstadt, what in its subtle simplicity to me is one of the most spectacular poems, ‘Als-Ob,’ As-If. The English translation from the German is mine, from Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return:

I know a little tiny town
A city just so neat
I call it not by name
but call the town As-if

Not everyone may enter

Into this special place
You have to be selected
From among the As-if race

And there they live their life
As-if a life to live
Enjoying every rumor
As-if the truth it were

You lie down on the floor
As-if it was a bed
And think about your loved one
As if she weren’t yet dead

One bears the heavy fate
As-if without a sorrow
And talks about the future
As if there was – tomorrow

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day

Mordecai Ardon, Kristallnacht (Missa Dura Triptych),
Tate Gallery, London (© The Ardon Estate, by permission)

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is held on the Hebrew date 27th of Nisan, which this year begins in the evening of Sunday, April 27.

The six million Jews that perished, out of whom approximately one and a half million children are remembered in ceremonies and services held all over Israel, in schools and the media. At ten am on Yom HaShoah, a siren is sounded across the country, which comes to a complete standstill, in silent commemoration.

Living with Jung: "Enterviews"
with Jungian Analysts, Vol. 3
by Robert and Janis Henderson 

The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Silence is the Center of Feeling," in Living with Jung: "Enterviews" with Jungian Analysts, Vol. 3 , by Robert and Janis Henderson.

Robert Henderson: As a Jungian what are some of the important lessons or observations you have of the Holocaust or Shoah?

Erel Shalit: This is quite a big question – profound and to me personally meaningful.

I feel I have to anchor it in my personal background, but before that, a word on etymology: Holocaust is an ambiguous word. In the sense “everything has been burned,” it is an apt denomination of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. However, considering its original meaning pertaining to religious sacrifice, as it was used prior to WW2, makes it a rather cynical term.

While I use both Holocaust and the Hebrew word, Shoah, I prefer the latter, which has no similar religious implications. It means catastrophe, destruction, to crash into ruins, to lay waste, to make desolate. It may possibly be connected to the Hebrew word for being amazed, to wonder, “to stand empty of thoughts.”

While many aspects of the Shoah have occupied my consciousness during much of my adult life, the repression and the silence about the Holocaust during my childhood is striking. The silence in the aftermath of the War was of course common among refugees and survivors, reflecting how the soul is at a loss dealing with catastrophe.

In contrast to less fortunate relatives – among them, my paternal grandmother who was gassed in Auschwitz – my parents found refuge in Sweden.

……

Silence about the war during those years was, I believe, a means to gain a foothold in an uprooted world, awareness that there were others so much worse off, and an effort at protecting the children. Only later did I hear for instance about the officer at a local Gestapo headquarters where my father had to report, who for some unknown reason told him quickly to get out and run away.

That is one of those big moments in life where something seemingly minor yet tremendously powerful, such as a friendly smile, or a smell of an unconscious memory, makes the wind of fate blow in an unexpected direction. I am forever grateful to that unknown Gestapo officer, and I often remind myself that he may be present in my greatest enemy. Just like evil resides in the soul of everyone of us, there may be light in the midst of darkness; where the shadows of horror cover the face of the earth, you may unexpectedly find the exceptional person.

My father, who came from a family of rabbis, had to set the spiritual and philosophical life aside, in order to gain a foothold and provide for his family in a surrounding that was not really his. I found it fascinating how the pile of books, with Goethe and Feuchtwanger and Heine on top, served as the fourth leg of his bed, finding relief from their prosaic task when my father occasionally pulled one of them out, perhaps trying to understand his own exile.

But as I said, what in retrospect has come to strike me most strongly is the silence. The Holocaust, which had broken the link to the immediate past, was not spoken about. There was a distant, Biblical past, and the efforts to secure an unknown future.

Silence served the repression of loss, and the sense of displacement. Silence was a barrier against memories that threatened to flood the island of survival, but it probably became as well an obstacle to live a full life; silence, like when you concentrate not to lose the grip of the rope you are hanging on to and fall into the abyss. A silence filled by the shadows of pain and fear that creep up just because you try to keep them away by not talking about them. A silence so oppressive that it threatens all the time to explode. This is the silence that holds both the fear and the instinctive warning, which Jung says we try to avoid by noise, since “Noise protects us from painful reflection, it scatters our anxious dreams.”

So at the center of my way of relating to the Holocaust is Silence.

There are different kinds of silence, from the meaningful silence, which gives birth to wisdom, to the freezing silence of trauma, both extremes of this duality pertain to the Holocaust, or the Shoah, for me filled with irresolvable duality.

But there is not only the silence of the victim. There is the silence of denial. As Elie Wiesel has said, what hurts the victim more than the cruelty of the oppressor is the silence of the bystander. We have rightly spent much effort to try understand the victim, as well as the psychology of the perpetrator. I believe there is much more that we need to learn about the bystander, because we are becoming a world of pseudo-involved bystanders. It is easy to identify a Holocaust-denier, but repression is more complicated – not being affected, not being touched, whereby we refrain from ascribing adequate meaning. To me, this is when we disconnect from the Self, the archetype of meaning. We are flooded by external, sometimes actively manipulated images (who looks carefully at a photograph these days, when hundreds can be produced digitally and you don’t need to develop a single one?), and we believe this is reality, while it is a map that often has only a weak or no relation any longer to reality. We believe that the flood of images and information makes us more knowledgable, but mostly it is a superficial preoccupation with stupidities, such as tracking what people you know are doing, finding out that they are tracking you tracking them, etc., as on Twitter.

And so we lose track of the meaningful images that by repression thrive underground. This is part of the “degenerative symptoms of urban civilization,” which Jung speaks about, and which produces all this babble-chatter, or noise in Jung’s words, which, he says, “stops the inner instinctive warning.” If we don not feel the tremor, we cannot identify what is boiling underground. This is where I feel we have not learned enough from the Shoah, and may fail the future, which may crash into ruins, become a desolate wasteland.

If to me silence is the center of feeling, or affect as regards the Shoah, duality is the axis that pertains to the aspect of thinking. Like any other totalitarian state of mind or movement, Nazism was based on splitting and projection. While consciousness is based on differentiation and separation, in its extreme, this becomes evil and diabolic (‘throwing apart’) – who shall live and who shall die, which race shall prevail and which shall perish. When the ego is in archetypal identification with Absolute Truth, the shadow is projected onto the Other, who “has to” be persecuted. We may easily see how this happened in the past, or how it appears in totalitarian regimes or fundamentalist thinking, but it is as nearby in today’s fragmented world, in which there is no longer one narrative, but anything is considered as truthful as everything else. Jung was so right when he said “man’s psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil.”

Turning meaningful contemplation of evil into the banality of meaningless repetition

Someone by the name of Phil Chernofsky has written a book called And Every Single One Was Someone. At the price of $80 (ok, you get a discount on Amazon) you can purchase this 1250 pages book. The book, "written" by a math and Jewish studies teacher, is his attempt, as the book description claims, to relate in a meaningful way to the Holocaust. It repeats the word Jew six million times.

If this were merely an artistic monument and commemoration to the one and every one of the murdered Jews, it might have had some value. However, artistic memorials of the victims of the Shoah and horrors of the Nazi era of greater depth and significance have been created, such as Micha Ullman’s breathtaking monument at Bebelplatz.

Micha Ullman's memorial at Bebelplatz,
where the Nazi book burnings began

If the author would have taken the longer road, and written down the name of each Jew murdered by the Nazis on a scroll, leaving empty spaces for each one of the nameless, he would, likewise, have contributed something valuable, helping the Someone in every single one to stand out.

With all his good intentions (as I assume he has, and not merely using the simplistic gimmick for self-serving purposes), the author has let the machine repeat, ‘copy and paste’, the word 'Jew' to the point where meaningful contemplation of the coldest of evil turns into the banality of meaningless repetition, taking away from the singularity of the crime.
 As one reviewer so rightly says, "To have a name was to assign a human quality." That is exactly why this book would have been a major accomplishment, if it would, as I suggest, have the every name of the Nazi victims written down, with the no less horrific empty spaces in between for those countless victims whose names are not known, often becauase the entire extended family was assasinated in the most horrendous of human crimes.

Lakes of Memory and Burning Nights

adagio & lamentation

ISBN: 9781926715056

poems by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Il Piccolo editions, Fisher King Press, 2010
Carmel, CA

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky was the first child born in the New World to a family of German Jewish refugees from the Shoah. Many in her family were lost in the death camps. It has been the subject and the gift of her poetry and prose-to write herself out of the terror, into life. Naomi had a special tie with her only surviving grandparent, the painter Emma Hoffman, whom she called "Oma." Oma showed her that making art can be a way to transmute grief, a way to bear the unbearable. The cover of adagio and lamentation is a watercolor by Emma Hoffman-an interior view of the Berkeley home where Naomi visited her often as a teenager. Oma tried her best to make a painter of her, but Naomi was no good at it. Poetry was to be her vehicle. Adagio and Lamentation is Naomi's offering to her ancestors, a handing back in gratitude and love. It is also her way of bringing them news of their legacy-the cycle of life has survived all they suffered-Naomi has been blessed by many grandchildren.

Download a free preview

A Review by Erel Shalit of adagio & lamentation, appears in the Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Summer 2012 (vol 6:3):

Poet and Jungian analyst Naomi Lowinsky’s journey of adagio & lamentation begins with a desire, a longing, a plea to Grandmother Emma Hoffman, Oma, to stop being dead, so she can talk about the light of morning and the light of late afternoon. Then, perhaps, the poet can grasp the meaning of the difference between the painter’s painted shadows, when she shapes emptiness, and like the creator, “there was light” (2010, 1).

And the journey ends at the threshold of summer’s tremor, when one might hear the sound of distant drums, or a helicopter, the anxiety that echoes deeply in the whisper of the gods in the living oak trees and the god of dreams—“is it a war machine,” or a fire, or memories to be penned (90)?

Even the ghost story poems contain beauty and sensuality; the complexes that are our ghosts may be “breaking into a million fragments,” but may, as well, in the oceanic turmoil and intensity of youth, “cause the trumpet vine on the back fence to flower for the first time” (5–6).

Read the full review

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche is an international journal published quarterly for the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, one of the oldest institutions dedicated to Jungian studies and analytic training. 

Founded in 1979 by John Beebe under the title The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Jung Journal has evolved from a local journal of book and film reviews to one that attracts readers and contributors from the academy and the arts, in addition to Jungian analyst-scholars.

cover of the Jung Journal
(San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal)

Featuring peer-reviewed scholarly articles, poetry, art, book and film reviews, and obituaries, Jung Journal offers a dialogue between culture--as reflected in art, literature, science, and world events--and contemporary Jungian views of the dynamic relationship between the cultural and personal aspects of the human psyche.