Filling the silence

It has started to feel like it for quite some time, but until now it has neither been voiced nor confirmed. That confirmation came from Manfred Goldberg just hours after his dear friend Zigi Shipper died last week. The thought? It’s the end of an era.

Zigi was one of the last nationally recognisable Holocaust survivors who, despite age and ailment, could still communicate lucidly and effectively the horrors they lived through. His passing, Manfred said, marked “the end of an era”.

Those words sit heavy. The silence left by survivors is dense and uncomfortable. The void cannot easily or – in many cases – adequately be filled. Therein lies the challenge of Holocaust educators: what to do when your primary resource runs out.

Coming just before Holocaust Memorial Day, Zigi’s death feels starker than it may otherwise have done. When someone we love dies, it is of course a great loss.

What, then, is the weight of loss if – as happens at the end of an era – the last of a generation dies, in this case a generation whose number was already much diminished by evil?

As the past runs out, we must look to the future. The theme for this year’s HMD is ‘ordinary people’.

It was ordinary people who stood by, persecuted, rescued, came through. Ordinary people make history. It ever was and ever will be.

Zigi was an ordinary person who went through an extraordinary time and then found, from somewhere, the power to tell it. As he always said, it is only the future that we can do something about. May the past forever inform it.

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