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Understanding each partner’s collective memory and identity and confronting it with our own mental images seems to be the only path of future dialogue. Study of memory and identity building in Israel can also help Poland to deal with its own past and images. (Cubicles, n. D. ). We must also be able to tell the difference between memory and identity and in order to do that we must first understand how the two interact with each other.
Memory can take on different forms depending on whose doing the remembering, and who is sharing the information. Whether it be personal or family or private group preferences allows, and some time will enforce the changes, omissions and interpretations made by there that could serve some current purpose or sometimes be implemented without visible aim. There is always some kind of political or social context in which memory is created and shared. Memory can also be altered according to current needs (Thiele,1989).
According to (Halfbacks, 1992) collective memory is the reconstruction of the past with data and facts from the present time; it is based on stories and documents provided by eye witnesses and later be processed by historians. The holocaust was a time of great sorrow for the Jews and other religious groups. The Nazis, along with German armies were responsible for the tarring of this horrific event which was one of the most tragic events in history.
In the bible, the Jews were said to be God’s chosen people, but after learning about the holocaust one begins to wonder. It was obvious the Nazis had a different perspective on how they perceived the Jews. The Nazis hated Jews and anyone who was against the Nazis and the Jews would go through great trials for many years to come because of it. Jews have been persecuted countless time before going back to the Roman Empire and most notably during the holocaust when millions of Jews were killed for no other reason other than their ethnic backgrounds.
Jewish people were most notable for their practice of Judaism believing in one God. They read the Torah, which is their bible and had several traditional holidays which they celebrated which includes the Yon Kipper, Hanukkah, and Passover during the Christmas season and Derided is a common Hanukkah game which is played among Jewish children. The highest Jewish population is in Israel and America. Considering their populations a very high percentage of Jews have won noble peach prizes including Albert Einstein.
When it comes to history and literature we can all agree that they are both very important and Just as important as the other. Literature is a reflection of a certain place and time in history. We can all agree to that and history tells the story of the past but literature can give us a picture of the past. It can show us how people dressed, wore their hair, how they lived and the type of car they drove. So we know that literature has a lot of artistic value as well of that particular moment in time that they put on paper and brings the whole story full circle.
If we look back in history to where this all started one man stands out and his name is Doll Hitler, this man is the reason for the murder of millions of Jewish people during he Second World War by the Nazis by the orders being given to them by this one man. This has often made people wonder why did Hitler hate the Jews so much that he would want them wiped from the face of the earth, there are many theories but will we ever know which is the correct one or if any of them is the correct one.
Hitler wrote a semi-autobiographical book Mien Kampala that highlighted his political ideologies and in this book he mentioned that as a young boy in Vienna, Austria when trying to enroll in a Academy of Fine Arts school his application was rejected cause the academy did not want another landscape artist and he was convinced that the panel members who rejected his application were Jews and this was actually the time he first took hatred for the Jews and these feelings towards the Jews actually compounded and grew stronger after the First World War.
Another theory is that his mother worked in the house of a Jewish family where the head of the family made her pregnant resulting in the birth of Hitler himself and the family paid off the mother to buy her silence and at that point Hitter’s mom was already married. On ending out he was the illegitimate son of a Jewish man and considering that his non biological father was harsh a disciplinarian towards him could have spurred the hatred for Jews even more but of course this is pure speculation and there is no evidence to support this theory which would be very interesting.
In Europe the bad feelings of Anti-Semitic were always there and when Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles to end the first world war, and with Germany facing economic hardship they had to blame someone and they were humiliated by having to sign the ready so the blame fell on the Jewish community because they had money and held positions of influence. They claimed the Jews were the reason for the treaty being signed and they pressured Germany so they could become even richer. So when Hitler seen this he felt this was his chance to capitalize on the idea this being combined with the Jealousy.
So while the Germans was struggling to make ends meet the Jews were earning money as doctors, lawyers and other skilled positions. It seems that Hitler had rationale on rationale during that period as to why he believed the Jews were worthy of such hate. One reason for sure was that he believed the Germans were a race of Nordic of peoples who were superior in all ways to all non- German people and since the Jews were Non-Nordic he reviled them along with the Romania, Slavs and other ethnic minorities.
Some felt that Hitter’s hatred for Jews was fictitious and was fabricated for political mileage, also some say that Hitter’s parents were racist as well but these theories have not been substantiated. Hitler was the founder and leader of the German Fascism (Nazis). And like most dictators, Hitler used propaganda to rise to power and took control of Germany and its armies n 1945. German narratives on the holocaust have changed since 1945 propelled by debates during that time along with political developments and distance from historical events.
The German population tends to focus on their fate as to idealize their society’s behavior during the holocaust era. Germany’s students have trouble connecting German history to the holocaust. In Germany the narrative of the holocaust and how it passed from one generation to the other depends on how one looks at it. Public events such as The Holocaust Remembrance Day are celebrated on January 27th and Charlatanic Remembrance Day is November 9th. As changed the German perspectives on the holocaust and will have long term effects on how the country now deals with the subject.
For the twelve years that Germany was ruled by the Nazi party, it was believed that in society certain people who was thought to be dangerous needed to be eliminated in order for Germany to survive and overtime and locale these people varied. Among them were gypsies, Poles, Russians and their main focus were the Jews. Once the Germans condemned the Jews to death there would be no escape. There was nothing they could do to change the behaviors or life that would make a difference regarding their fate.
The Nazis would comb the cities in search of the Jews, trapping every one that would try to slip pass them and their goal was to find and kill them all. They no longer had a country to call their own or any means of self-defense and the majority of the population turned their backs on them and many of them were instrumental in leading them to the death camps. Never since the dawn of history had the world witnessed such a campaign of extermination. An entire nation was legitimately handed over by the government to reducers organized by authority the goal of killing an entire nation of people.
In the second half of 1945, 90,000 of Jewish refugees arrived in Palestine from Europe. All of them had survived under Nazi or Soviet occupation and the majority had been in concentration camps then over the next few years another 60,000 survivors would follow and at the end of 1949, there were around 350,00 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust living in Israel and representing one third of the population (Akron, 1957). Those who survived were not warmly welcomed when they relocated to their new Tate and nation. In Israel on the wave of constructing a new identity there was no space in public discourse for non-heroic elements.
Those who had been led to slaughter did not get recognition in the eyes of the battled hardened Israelis in fact their histories and memories were treated as a social collective taboo. Many of the survivors had to face the psychological problem of starting a new life and felling the guilt for being a survivor in the first place. All their stories were aimed at Justifying their survival and with the lack of language to describe the cruelties of war and Unicode which left them trapped in their own memories which could only be shared with their relatives.
Some survivors were able to find relief by fierce belief in and construction of the news Israeli Zionist identity, at the same time freezing its traumatic experiences for the indefinite future by trying to find ways to deal with their nightmares on their own and depriving their children of the answers which were often formulated among the young generation but rarely asked. The survivor would also falsify their past in order to be perceived as heroic fighters born already in Israel (Damages, 2000).