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Michal Govrin et. al, "But There Was Love―Shaping the Memory of the Shoah" (de Gruyter, 2025)
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A
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B
The diminishing numbers of survivors of history's worst atrocity. The industrialized murder of millions with the goal of total eradication of an ancient people. The genocide known as the Holocaust. With the passing of living witnesses, the challenge of remembering becomes increasingly urgent. Welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on Ideas. I'm your host, Renee Garfinkel. Today's guest, Michal Govrin is an award winning and prolific author, poet and theater director. She's also the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. We're honored to have her with us today to discuss a book of singular importance. The product of years of groundbreaking and heartbreaking work by a group of artists, scholars and descendants of survivors. They worked together on the core mission of developing ways to reshape Holocaust away from the singular narrative of Jewish victimhood toward a multifaceted recognition of human dignity. The result of their years of work is the book we'll discuss today called But There Was Shaping the Memory of the Shoah. Michal Govrin, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:25]
C
Welcome and thank you very much, Rene.
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B
Michal, why was it important for you and your co editors to replace Holocaust with Shoah in the title? What meanings are gained or lost in that shift?
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C
First of all, I was not the first one to do that. Claude Lanzmann, in his Monumental movie Shoah struggled to change the title of Holocaust. You know that in Hebrew the name is Shoah, Yiddish, Itzhuban, and in the European languages. The term Holocaust has in it reminiscence of the non Jewish consciousness, of the Christian consciousness. The Latin meaning is hollow. Cost is a total sacrifice which was totally absent from the self consciousness and the self image that the victims had on themselves. So by doing, coining the title as reshaping or shaping the memory of the Shoah, we stress our objection to that term Holocaust that immediately brings with it false connotations and the gaze of the outsider on the Jewish people. And we open here something which is very timely, the fierce discussion between Christian and Muslim images and the self images of the Jewish people.
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B
In the book's introduction, you call for remembrance rooted in resistance and resilience rather than victimhood. How has that basic idea been received among survivors and the broader public?
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C
Actually, we were expressing their own ideas. We quote in the hit Kansut, which is a ceremony that came out also from our work. We quote the manifesto written by the survivors and we had the honor of the person who wrote it, that read it aloud for us. They say that as Viktor Frankl says, there was despair, there was giving up, and there was also a struggle to survive against the Nazis. And I think that this is the most important legacy of how people survive in these inhuman, extreme worlds on the brink of death. And as Aaron Appelfeld said to us, there was love and love to a child of a mother of people, each other, the knowledge, how to say a word, that was what kept the people alive. And I think that this legacy was forgotten because of the ambient Christian legacy that sees in victimhood and in sacrifice a way to salvation. And this is something which was very foreign to Jewish legacy. And we wanted to stress that and to give something to the world by reminding, as we now learn from those who were in the tunnels kidnapped by Hamas, that this is the human power that gives you the force to go on living. And that is the big legacy of the survivors of the Shoah. According to myself and the group that we were working together, that's really a.
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B
Stark difference between salvation coming from martyrdom or self sacrifice or victimhood versus salvation coming from the struggle to be, to continue.
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C
Absolutely. We touch here into the core of the theology. I mean, the Jewish theology gives the power to mankind and to humans to participate in the creation of the non perfect world, while the Christians mostly are waiting to the return of the Savior. And. But I would like to say that love is also a legacy of Christianhood. And fortunately there were many loving Christians the just among the nations who helped rescue Jews. So the image is not clear, But I mean, speaking in general terms, that's the point.
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B
Let's talk about the process of the working group. The group was extremely diverse. The research group included survivors, descendants of survivors, artists and scholars. How did the diversity influence the direction and the tone of the project?
- [08:20]
C
Coming from literature and theater directing, I knew that we have to touch the the soul and not only stay on the level of ideas. When in the first meeting, ETI Ben Zaken sang for us the song of the Jews of Saloniki as they arrived in Auschwitz, in Landino. And then Mandy Khan sang a song in Yiddish and all of us started to dance around the tables of Alear and knew that the point is there. I mean, the meetings were scholarly and emotionally mixed together. I don't think that you can remember without that dimension. We had the honor of hosting Aaron Appelfeld, who spoke in a very personal way. Then a conversation between Saul Friedlander and Otto Dov Kulka, the great scholars of the history of the Shoah, of who were both survivors. All of them, I mean, with Appelfeld were the survivors. I mean, people met for the first time in that way, the legacy of their parents. So I think that the group had a dimension of scholarship and shifting the memory from victimhood and sacrifice into resilience and power of the spirit. But it also had a tremendous power of breaking what I call the. How do you say that in English? The geled. Something that covers a wound. And that silence that characterized Israel in the first years was broken in the group. People could relate to their own stories in a new way. And I think that this is our role now, when the survivors are not with us, are disappearing with great pain, and we don't hear their voice. How to live with this memory in the present time. And we see more wars and more of the same attitude that we forgot about the power of the human to stand against and to hope and to live.
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B
You mentioned the silence that characterized Israel in the beginning, right after the war, that people didn't talk about their experience. How did your mother's silence about her wartime experiences, especially the murder of her first family, impact you back when you were a child and later as an adult?
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C
Yeah, I just want to add that the silence was both ways, because people didn't want to hear. Israel was in a war of existence and there was no time to hear the survivors. So it was from both sides. As for me, I'VE just finished writing a long book that everything came out of it, the Mother's Silence. I'm now going through the galleys of it, and I didn't know that my mother was a Holocaust survivor until I was, I think, nine or 10. I mean, I didn't know consciously. I was giggling at the ceremonies in the school because what do I have to do with these 6 million? But the legacy came through very strongly. It took me a lifetime to say my brother and not the child of my mother. These are phenomenon, consciousness, phenomenon that I try to address in the book how I didn't hear, how I didn't want to hear, how I survived by not hearing, and yet how I heard what I heard. And it shaped me. Only 20 years after my mother's death did I start researching when my own girls were my own daughters were big enough and my husband, who also was born in the end of the war, could do some of the journey with me. It is a lifetime process and I was happy that my relationship to my mother has changed. While she was alive, I was embarrassed to look her straight in the eyes. And now I see her as a close woman whose lesson I incorporated and whom I can love in a new mode of love after recreating her and giving her life through the through the work of fiction.
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B
You're reading the galleys of your new book, so don't tease the listeners. What's the name of the book and when will it come out?
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C
The name of the book now is Bather's Silence. I hope it will come in English translation. The French translation is already waiting. And I want also to add that I gave life to all the family that I only knew by names. Now they are people for me. They are alive in a fiction way or in a real way. What is memory? What is fiction? The name of the group that I directed was transmitted memory and fiction because we have only stories. But these stories make us alive.
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A
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B
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, because in your book history, memory and imagination all play a role. The dialogue you referred to earlier between the two well known historians, both of whom were survivors themselves, was very powerful. One emphasizes the centrality of history and public remembrance and the other introduces the idea of a landscape of death that lives in the subconscious. So how do you think we should balance memory as evidence versus memory as metaphor?
- [16:50]
C
That's a very complicated question, Rene, and I don't think that there is one answer to it. As for me, I know I can only speak for myself. I think that when I meet the people who actually perform Hit Kansut that ceremony, and when I see at the end that they are changed, that they have touched something in their soul that they did not dare touching hidden places and that they receive their parents or the legacy or the history in a broader way. I as an artist is looking for these moments, these tears in the eyes of young and old people. And I feel at that moment that something has changed in this world. People. I'm morely working in the realm of emotions and I think that something that touches you will stay with you and ideas may come and go. You can stick to ideology, but beneath it there is life and emotion and your family and the small circle and you as a human being and how do you face this world? And I think that we can learn from the Shoah that was evil which was created by man and there was the heights of the human soul that were enacted by Jews and also by non Jews. And this is for us to choose. And when a person in moments of truth stands in front of that, the choice is given. And I hope the choice is for the positive part. We have tears of fear, tears of shock, but we also have tears in our eyes when we face human dignity. And this is what I'm looking for.
- [19:07]
B
Well, you mentioned Hit Kun Sut a couple of times and Tell us about the ritual of Hit Kun Sut. In your chapter about it, you critique both the traditional religious rituals of memory as well as secular commemoration. So how is Hit Khan Sutton different and what is it? Elaborate please.
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C
I was influenced by the Seder of Pesach where we speak about the slavery in Egypt. But most of it is the power of going, of the exodus, of going out from it. And in that sense we remind in the it can suit. Actually it's a play for the audience. So we remind, we say that we are here and every group does it in a different way. And we say that we remember the world which was before. That usually is passed very quickly in this commemoration. The life, the full life, the rich life, and in all the diaspora and in all places where Jews lived. It's so colorful. So we don't have a ceremony where we remember the different communities and Yom Hashoah. It's also a celebration of life. Then of course we go into the destruction and we lament in it. There is are parts of the official ceremonies and of the religious ceremonies. I'm not against them, but we somehow englobe them. So people can light a candle, say Kaddish privately in many ways. And then there is a chapter about evil. And it's interesting to say that when the it can Sut was translated into English and it can be found on the web. The American partners came back to the Nazis evil. And we said no, but evil is inside any man. And now after this terrible war of two years, we see that we can also commit horrible acts. And there are human beings and we have to remember that evil in us and fight against it. Yet then the most important part is the ways that people were facing it. And we enumerate many, many things. The uprise in the ghettos, but also at the Hillesum and lighting candles in the women's bark in Auschwitz and we quote Appelfeld and Friedland there. And. And then people somehow see that inside the camps, not what you visit in the museum of Auschwitz, only the relics, but inside the camps there was a rich life on the brink of death. And the last part is the power of the just among the nations and who endangers their families themselves without any direct interest. But they saved people and the heroism of the uprooted who made the ways either to the Hasbara or many of them to Israel and started a new life. That's a huge power. And the last part of it is the question how shall we remember responsibly? And each year it changes that Covid had another edge to it, the war in the Ukraine. And for sure, now incorporating it, the voices of the people from the settlements near Gaza or from those who were kidnapped or from those who were dead. And. And the heroism which is now among us is a power that we can identify with. And people come out of that hidden suit uplifted and not crushed. And uplifting gives you power to go on.
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B
Absolutely. Now, you mentioned Aaron Appelfeldt, and I just want to give him a little more space, especially since the book's title comes from that very moving interview with him. Everything was death, but within it there was a lot of love. Tell us more about what he really meant by that.
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C
Ahon Aberfeld was a child during the Holocaust, and in his huge body of.
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B
Work.
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C
He goes into this frontier between Jews and Christians in Europe and portrays it and voices out the human light in different circumstances. Each book shows it in a different way. And there is a book that came now as a movie, the Room of Mariana, who is about a prostitute who gets. Who holds in her room a Jewish child and saves him. And you learn about that woman and about her biography and about the huge heart that she has. And there is another book that speaks about a group that is hiding in the swamps trying to fight the Nazis. But they are learning Buber and they are learning Hasidism. So in all his books, Aaron, who I had the chance of being a close friend of him, was a teacher, like one of the great teachers of Judaism. What is the human heart? How is it functioning? And in shades which he describes, and in moments of this blinding light, and that's what he said to us when he came, that inside the power to write comes not from the visions of death and betrayal, but from the visions of love and humankind.
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B
It's just so touching. I practically cried when I read that chapter. There've been a lot of criticism of Holocaust education in America in particular, and probably in other Western countries, in light of the alarming rise of antisemitism now, especially since October 7th, in what ways do you hope your research and this book will help shape public memory and Shoah education moving forward?
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C
Holocaust education was mainly based on the testimonies of survivors and of stories or random stories, evil and the death camps. It was important to tell because the Nazis tried to hide everything and things were not known. So it was a trap because you had to tell about what happened. Yet the sacrifice edge to it fell into ears that were ready to hear it of the Western world. And more and more that Sacrifice and the victimhood became sacred. And we have seen the shift of the role of the victim from the Jews to the Palestinians. And that's the burst of antisemitism today in the world is the expression of that shift that happened slowly, but it burst out. Now that's a trap which I don't want to criticize, but it is embedded. I think that what was missing in that legacy and the joy of being accepted immediately was camouflaging. It was the real voice of the survivors, like my mother or her mates or her ultra orthodox women who survived with her the human courage and the human dignity, the human ability to take the fate in the hands, to choose what is your position. And this is something which was missing from Holocaust or as an accent from the Holocaust education. I think that we are now in a crossroad when victimhood is taken from us. And even the term genocide, which was coined for the Nuremberg Trials, is now used against Israel because that's a substitution mode which is very old and we won't go into it. It's part of the theology and part of the theology that enters the non religious world unconsciously. If we as the procurator and the German procurator told me, and I was very moved, if the voice of the survivors of choosing life, not going into a revenge, turning the page, saying my revenge is creating a family, choosing life, building a country, contributing to science, contributing to literature. If this sound of this voice would have been heard, we will be in another place. And I think that in that book that we have just published, but there was love shaping the memory of the Shoah. We suggest that we suggest giving up the role of the sacrifice, the role of the victim and listening to the human dignity and to the human greatness, facing evil in different circumstances.
- [31:31]
B
And finally, Michal, how has the broader Jewish community in Israel and in the Diaspora responded to your work and to the new ceremony or ritual that you created?
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C
I think that the book was received by those who have access to it. And now it's an open access book in de Gruyter site. I think that the book will have his way and will touch many people. As for the ceremony that was vehicled by the Shalom Hartman Institute for the last 10 years, I can only testify that it was translated to English, as I say to French, to Russian. I met with many German groups. I spoke in Greece and all over the place. People were moved and could feel that there is a future of the memory in a constructive and luminous way.
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B
The book is. But there was shaping the memory of the Shoah. It's a powerful work, Michal. Thanks for sharing it with us today.
- [32:53]
C
Thank you, Rene, for the interview and for being able to speak.
- [32:57]
B
And thanks to our researcher, Bela Pasakov.
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C
It.