Recently in concentration camps Category
Synopsis
The Last
Sunrise by Harold Gordon
My name is Harold Gordon now! But 55 years ago I was a (10) year old boy whose
name was Hirshel Grodzienski. I lived with my family in Grodno, Poland, a city
of 65,000 inhabitants. 25,000 were of the Jewish faith and the majority were of
Catholic persuasion . We lived side by side and in peace most of the time.
Grodno is located at the most north Eastern corner of Poland, on the Niemen River bordering Lithuania. 136 kilometers to the North was the Baltic Sea and the Polish port city of Gdansk.
Within months after the Nazis occupied Grodno, my entire family except for my father, were gassed, burned and vaporized without leaving a trace of their existence.
All those years while I was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other extermination camps I kept praying to God. Often, when the pain became too much to bear I would say, God if you let me live I promise to take revenge and kill every Nazi that crosses my path. I will make them pay for taking my family from me and leaving me without a burial site to visit.
On May 8, 1945, when the war ended it was time to keep my promise. I began thinking. How many Nazis can I kill before I die, 10, 100, 1000. ? Then what? Who will remember my mother, grandparents, brother, aunts and uncles after I am gone.
I said to God, God, please forgive me for not keeping my promise. I have another plan in its place. I will make a good life for myself. A life that my mother would be proud of. I will raise a family, leave behind descendants so that there will be grandchildren for them to remember after I am gone. I will not forget my ancestors, I will put my memories in the deepest corner of my mind to recall them before my days on earth are ended.
Suddenly and without warning, I heard a call. Something began rumbling in my brain like a volcano. I knew it was time to fulfill my second promise.
I sat down at my computer every night after work, like a video it was all right before my eyes. Two years later, my book, The Last Sunrise was completed.
I couldn't help but wonder. Was there something else that God had in mind for me to fulfill? I was the youngest survivor from a city of 25,000 Jews. Why was I chosen to live. I was not the smartest nor the strongest. I was tormented looking for an answer.
Granted, I haven't seen the entire performance, but I had one major complaint with it. Although I did enjoy the concept, the lighting and the music, I felt too much emphasis was put on the masses and not enough put on the individual. Personally, I feel the only way people can make connections to the Holocaust (and bridge it to current happenings) is to recognize the humanity in the victims. When puppets stuck together to form rows of prisoners are placed on stage, it is hard to get a sense of any individual, which is the real loss in the Holocaust or any other genocide. We aren't losing masses of stick people, but actual people with families, hopes and dreams, faults and flaws. We are losing people just like you and me, which I feel is always essential to make people begin to understand something so outlandish. A well written character passing away under the thumb of an oppressive regime is much more heart breaking than watching masses of faceless, characterless people go to slaughter--at least in my opinion.
The installation is over in New York (although may be playing elsewhere), but you can look at a video here:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCWNQ2g9bLk">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCWNQ2g9bLk
</a>
What do YOU think?
You can view Hotel Modern's website here.
The other night, I sat around with a group of friends as we talked about different things going on in our lives. Someone spouted the age old wisdom that "It all works out in the end", which someone else challenged saying that "It does all work out, unless it doesn't." Being me, I brought the subject of genocide to the table asking whether or not the Holocaust, indeed, "worked out" for the victims. To say everything works out in the end when regarding the mass murder of innocents doesn't quite make sense. On a more micro level, it can be hard to say that everything works out in the end for children who die of serious illnesses, etc. Sometimes I find myself wondering if everything works out in the end only for those of us fortunate to have everything work out.
My friend argued that good things have come of the Holocaust. I'm not sure where I stand on this statement, as I'm not someone who buys into the idea that the Holocaust happened for an actual reason. At least, to this point in my life, all of the reasons people have proposed to me haven't seemed rational. I guess when discussing the Holocaust, there fails to be a rationale.
This friend cited that one good thing that came out of the Holocaust was Lisa Kudrow reuniting with her long lost relatives on "Who Do You Think You Are?". While that episode was certainly touching, and probably available on NBC's website, it is hard to justify that the Holocaust is equal to that.
However, if you read Imre Kertesz's work, Fatelessness in particular, he speaks without reservation of the joy and humanity found in the Holocaust. The message of the movie, which he was heavily involved in, is no doubt a message of humanity and the "good times" spent in the camps.
Recently, I discovered Ruth Kugler's memoir Still Alive, in which she says "Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps," she writes, recalling an argument with a naive German graduate student, "and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for?"
This is perhaps an argument that could go on cyclically forever. We cannot take the Holocaust back, so looking forward, what we can do is control our own future and look for the good in the cinders and ashes of it.
Maybe not everything works out for the best, but maybe looking forward, we can move toward healing the wounds.
