The following post is an abridged script for Dr Adam Stock’s Address at the Holocaust Memorial Day City of York Council Civic Event.
“The world is accessible to us only through interpretations”, writes academic Annick Wibben. To understand is to interpret. But in order to interpret, to understand our experiences, to explain our beliefs and to come to terms with “who we are and what we want to be,” we tell stories. Narratives, according to Wibben, “order our world”.
The ordering of words into a story can be a powerful thing. Stories are compelling. They compel us to see how events are related in a causal pattern. Stories compel us to perform an act we might call making meaning, by which we to try to comprehend the world around ourselves. Making meaning from the stories we are told can have extraordinary effects. On the one hand, stories may cast individuals solely as part of a larger group or reduce them to caricatures or stereotypes. But on the other hand, as we make meaning from stories we may start to identify with the people or characters they depict and see ourselves in their place, or we may begin to understand how others could act (legitimately or otherwise) with different motivations to our own. Words call us to perform the act of making meaning. It is in the gift of words is to bridge the gap between the experience of one person and another, one time and another, one space and another. Words matter. Words have power.
The power of words can take odd forms. One of the powers words have is to mask, to render bland the unacceptable or morally abhorrent. When German-Jewish philosopher and Holocaust refugee Hannah Arendt coined her famous phrase “the banality of evil” in 1960, she did so to describe the language by which Adolf Eichmann defended his actions as a principal architect of the Final Solution. The planned murder of millions of people became a matter of logistical arrangements conducted using technocratic euphemisms and impenetrable jargon. Words turn individual people into abstract concepts and statistical points of data without agency, lived experiences, needs or desires.
Interestingly in this context, the word propaganda has administrative origins: it derives from the Latin name of an office of the Church created in 1622 devoted to spreading Catholicism in non-Catholic countries. The power of propaganda is to produce a certain reality at the expense of other competing ideas. Propaganda skews what can and cannot be said, and to whom. It affects which acts are permissible in any given social and political context, and what acts (whether or not officially sanctioned by the propagandist) are likely to occur at any time.
During the Shoah propaganda was used to turn people from specific communities and groups into abstract figures of hate. Words of hate can create a barrier between a them and an us, to make one group of people feel out of place and that they do not belong so that another group can feel more tightly bonded and maintain power. In his work on the figure of the Stranger, Holocaust survivor and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman stated that humans need to feel that they exist within an environment ordered so that some things are likely to happen, some things less likely and some virtually impossible. Anything that does not fit into such an order is impure or dirty. Is it at all surprising then that the word “dirty” is often attached to anti-Semitic epithets like Yid? Dirt is something out of place. It is that which does not belong, a thing to be “dealt with” and swept away.
Of course, words are not only dangerous. Words can be empowering. Finding one’s voice and giving voice to personal experiences is an empowering act. It helps us to make meaning from the incomprehensible. And as I mentioned earlier, words offer the gift of a connection, the gift of forging a bridge between one person’s experience and another. At Holocaust Memorial Day events in York last week I experienced this listening to moving testimonies by refugees. With words we are often less alone.
But words are difficult, slippery things to work with. They have limits. In the preface to his Holocaust memoir Night, Elie Wiesel writes, “I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle… Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know. But would they at least understand?” The victim and the witness are asked to respond to something ungraspable. They cannot avoid doing so. But some things go beyond the abilities of words: between that “signifier” or sound image (“Auschwitz”), and the experiences of the prisoner who endured – and in most cases was permanently silenced there by death – lies an incommunicable chasm that cannot be bridged.
The witness must speak and try to make meaning from the incomprehensible. But the listener or reader also has important responsibilities: the responsibility to listen, to empathise and try to identify with the speaker, and to actively seek out the facts and data to support the testimony of the survivor. We have a responsibility to promote awareness of voices that are marginalised. Testimonies from LGBT survivors of the Holocaust, for example, are comparatively rare but the oral histories and memoirs of figures like Frieda Belinfante, Albrecht Becker and Gad Beck are important documents. We have the responsibility to use Holocaust testimony sensitively in pursuit of keeping memories alive and not distorting experiences for personal gain, melodrama or profit.
We also have responsibilities toward people in the here and now. Torture, genocide, and ethnic cleansing did not begin and end with the Holocaust. Our responsibilities are toward those displaced, persecuted and suffering discrimination. The organization TimeOut York works locally with LGBT asylum seekers. One of the people they have helped support is a Nigerian man who was attacked twice by a mob of neighbours. They tried to castrate him and they beat his partner to death. They subsequently mistook his brother for him and shot him in the back. He has physical injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, problems eating and sleeping, and suffers from panic attacks.
LGBT asylum seekers may have great difficulty talking about their sexuality, and some may still be in the process of defining themselves. Others cannot talk about the issue with people from the same countries, even sometimes in front of a Home Office interpreter from their own culture. They are usually afraid of authority, particularly the police. According to Home Office data released in November last year, just 63 gay asylum seekers from Nigeria were accepted while 268 were turned away.
Another person TimeOut York have worked with is a gay man from Georgia whose brother spotted him on television at a gay rights event and threatened to kill him, supported by the family. He had to go into hiding but they tracked him down and he had to flee the country. LGBT asylum seekers usually arrive in Britain alone without any support network of friends and family. Often they have been rejected by family and have no point of contact in their country of origin. If they are placed in Home Office accommodation – shared housing with other asylum seekers- or even worse in detention centres, they have to hide their sexuality from the other residents for fear of being attacked.
Statements of intent are fine things, but words, when they are overused, can become meaningless and empty. Moving beyond words means actions in our daily lives including calling out prejudice and questioning our own perceptions and biases. If we want to change the narratives that order our lives for the better we have to change the events which form those narratives. We make meaning from words. Let’s make words meaningful.