The Via Dolorosa

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."

Maya Angelou

I have hit a point in researching the Holocaust where I can look at a photograph of a decapitated head or an emaciated dead baby lying on top of a large pile of emaciated dead children and not scream in horror. I'm not sure I'm OK with that.

Every child in America learns that the Holocaust happened. Facts and figures. 6,000,000 Jews killed, including 1,000,000 children. Eugenics. Murder of the Romani. Pictures of somewhat emaciated, nameless figures and blurry pictures that hint at piles of bodies but seek to protect our delicate sensibilities from the sight of torment and death.

The Holocaust education I received in school was to my experience doing this voluntary, in-depth research as jumping on a trampoline is to sky diving. There are these moments of hope - "Oh! A transport left Theresienstadt with 1196 children on it! Maybe it was post-war and they were being sent to freedom!" - which are instantly dashed as I find that they were sent to Auschwitz and murdered in the gas chambers within hours of arrival.

I tried watching some of the remaining clips of the propaganda film made at Theresienstadt on the coat-tails of the successful ruse to convince the Danish Red Cross that the prisoners were being treated humanely. There's nothing grotesque in it. No bodies, no death, no murder, but its very quotidian mundanity is almost worse than a pile of bodies. I had to stop, I was so offended by the fact that anyone could consider doing this was somehow alright, so horrified by the thought of how terrified the inmates in the film must have felt that it seemed reasonable to play along with this scheme, and so disappointed that there were governments who were fooled by this act of legerdemain.

I worked night shifts in a psychiatric emergency room for several years, so I've developed a sort of gallows humor in order to cope with difficult situations. There are moments in a psych ER that are so profoundly surreal - getting screamed at by an Egyptian goddess, being attacked by someone flailing their prosthetic limb around like a baseball bat, watching a patient start calling one of the big muscly macho safety officers "Pookie" - that the mind's only way to accept what it's seen is to decide that everything is some sort of bizarre Terry Gilliam-esque fantasy... and to laugh.

I've actually found myself laughing at some of the Holocaust images I've seen, not because I find piles of bones and ashes to be in any way funny, but because it's become a defense mechanism; I laugh so I do not cry. I'm actually worried about the day when I come across a severed head and somebody catches me laughing, because I don't know if it's possible to adequately explain hysterical disbelief.

The only anodyne I've found is, oddly enough, watching episodes of Ancient Aliens, as the utter surrealism it provides is even greater than that which I experience when I realize I'm looking at something so completely and terribly inhuman. I know. I'm strange. But the dude with hair makes the real world seam a little more sane.

Laughing and sarcasm may not be the best coping mechanism in history; it certainly doesn't follow the Buddhist approach of breathing into one's experience. But it's working for me now, so I'll try not to feel too guilty about it.

I just needed to get that out of my system, because I've been feeling nauseated and jittery the last few hours with what I've read. Thank you for listening. Feel free to give me other suggestions for how to cope with the absurdity that such a wide-scale abomination of a tragedy could actually happen.

Oh, and...