Memories of the Holocaust

Cover via AmazonOn the eve of a flight to Israel with war (basically) raging between Hamas and Israel, I finished watching the screen adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated.

I highly recommend it.

The more things change (a state that exists to defend Jews), the more they stay the same (Jews killed and attacked simply for being Jews, see Sderot and Mumbai, for the most recent examples).

When I lived in Germany in 1995 studying the Holocaust, I remember thinking that my generation would be the last one to have face to face contact with actual survivors.

In watching this movie, I became a bit saddened. Actually, more than a bit...with memory fading daily and survivors dying, how can we possibly help our kids (and the world) understand what happened?

That an entire shtetl of Trachimbrod in Ukraine (1,042 people) was simply wiped off the map to the point where people there don't even know it ever existed?

And the only thing that remains is a small marker in the ground?

It's a massive burden for this transitional generation, though I suppose that is something that Foer recognizes and why his book (and Liev Schreiber's film direction) are poignant, helpful, and critical.