When they say the usual 'what were you (the Brits) doing about the holocaust' I always say the same thing; 'well I'm sorry my Dad didnt' do anything about the holocaust, he was too busy fighting the Japanese in Burma to give it his full attention. Oh and my mum was only 12 and had just lost her father.
So far, so good.
What were your parents doing?'
It usually gets an apology at that point.
One of these days you'll come across someone whose parents were the Central European children who were either liberated from the concentration camps or permitted to leave whatever closet/hidden pantry/basement/attic/convent they were hidden in for 6 yrs, once the war was over. Most of them were then resettled, because they didn't want to stay in a country where their memories were intolerable and because they had no one left to stay with. I'd be surprised if you got an apology from any of those, since they have nothing to apologise for, any more than you do for your mother's actions.
At the same time... I tend to agree with Brian's:
I don't think that we current Australians have anything to answer for. [...] we, the current generation are not to blame for what happened and therefore have nothing to answer for.
My Mother (being Jewish) lost her mother and both sisters in Auschwitz. Yet I never heard her say that *Germans* were to blame for it; it was always *Hitler's Germany* -- quite a different "animal". And, although most of her friends were Jewish, it was because they'd shared pre-war memories (and the language; Yiddish came to her as readily as Polish, being her first language). I never heard her say (as I have some of the others): "oh she's very nice, *even though* she's Polish". As she pointed out, that's as racist a statement as the famous "my best friend is a Jew"...
What was good enough for her, whose "stake" in the Holocaust was much more immediate than mine, is good enough for me. I do not believe in "wholesale" (national) guilt, nor in "wholesale" blame, nor in "wholesale" penance/atonement. Especially not of the kind that goes on forever and ever, keeping the fires of hatred from going out.
Holocaust, and all other iniquities need to be remembered *so that they don't happen again*. *Not* because the sins of the fathers ought to be visited on the children up to 5th generation -- that was *Hitler's* way of reasoning.
I used to get livid when a male German would tell me what a splendid time he'd had in Poland between 1939 and 1945, and expect me to think we could "bond" on that basis. But there are fewer and fewer of those left, thankfully, so it doesn't happen very often any more. I still get very bristly when someone, on hearing I came from Poland, says: "my father/grandfather was in Poland in WWII; he was in Luftwaffe (Air Force)/in Wermacht (Army)". IMO, it's nothing to brag about (nobody, BTW, has ever "bragged" to me about their fathers/granfathers being in SS, though some must have been).
But I get *much more upset* when I hear from someone that Holocaust never happened or was grossly exaggerated; I wish it were mandatory for those people to go and take a tour of both the concentration and the extermination camps, the way I had to as a teenager; photos and films alone just don't carry the message strongly enough. And as for the neo-Nazi b.....s who think the racial "cleansing" of WWII hadn't gone far enough and would like to "improve" on it, *now*...
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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