Yom Hashoah in Cambodia

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SARAH FIFE BLOG

May 20, 2009

EACH year on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), we take time as individuals, and as a community, to remember the Shoah, to honour the survivors, to pay tribute to the victims and to recommit ourselves to having an active part in “never again.”

Since I was a child, I have been privileged to attend and participate in annual Yom HaSshoah events in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and, more recently, in Sydney, Australia.

While the programs vary from year to year, I can confidently say that I go into each one with a rough idea of what to expect: stories from survivors, candle lightings, poetry, songs, just to name a few.

This year I had a remarkably different experience for I spent Yom Hashoah in Cambodia.

Why Cambodia, you ask? Well, I was in Cambodia because that’s where my husband Tim and I (pictured) happened to be, because we are currently on a year-long travel adventure, exploring various places and communities in the world.

When we arrived in Cambodia (and indeed when we set out travelling), we knew that our experience of the Jewish festivals would be different this year as we would be away from our nearest and dearest and in lands foreign and unknown to us.

Earlier in April, we were fortunate to connect with a Jewish ex-pat community and enjoyed a wonderful Passover seder complete with matza ball soup.

The seder itself was a quick one and there were moments of communal remembrance of the Exodus but, as seders go, I’d have to admit that it was not the most meaningful one that I had ever attended.

Nonetheless, as I sat at the table, I had a deep appreciation both of freedom and of the process of becoming free and, days before some people had even obtained their Yom Hashoah yahrtzeit candles, I was already thinking deeply about how we honor our survivors, how we pay tribute to those we’ve lost and how we’ve rebuilt ourselves as a community, both after the Exodus and after the Holocaust.

It might seem ironic that such intense thought and emotion came to me not while ensconced within the Jewish community (though it certainly has) but rather in Cambodia, a country so different to anywhere I’ve ever called home.

You see, the reason for such contemplation was that I found myself, for the first time, within a survivor community.

In today’s Cambodia, each and every person who is my age (30) or older is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge empire, a tyrannical and paranoid communist regime which wreaked havoc on Cambodian society between 1975 and 1979, killing nearly two million people, roughly 25% of the total population.

The small children that run around Cambodia today are the children of those survivors, people who lived through Pol Pot’s regime of mass killings, torture, starvation and labor camps only thirty years ago.

While in Cambodia, Tim and I had the opportunity to learn about the Khmer Rouge Empire, to visit historical sites, to read stories, to see films and even to attend the United Nations War Tribunal of the Extraordinary Chambers of the Court of Cambodia (similar to the Nuremburg Trials) where we witnessed an afternoon of testimony in the case against Duch, a Khmer Rouge leader who is being tried for war crimes some thirty years after the end of the war.

It brought to mind thoughts about reconciliation and healing and the challenges that they bring.

Nearly ten years ago, I wrote an undergraduate Honors Thesis at Carnegie Mellon University entitled “The Holocaust: Did it Really End with Liberation?”.

Through my travels, interviews and writings, I came to explore the questions of what it means to live as part of post-genocide community and how we can continue to keep the legacy alive while allowing people to heal.

What a shock it was for me to learn that these types of questions have not found a place in Cambodian society today.

Tim and I went to Cambodia with interest in hearing from survivors and in learning how their communities are healing themselves.

We had simply assumed that we would find parallels between their community and ours and that there were bridges to be built with our shared experiences as part of communities of survivors.

We were shocked to learn that while there may be parallels, there seemed to be many more perpendiculars -– that is to say that while we come from a community of sharing and teaching, the Cambodians are a quiet, accepting culture where “saving face” is the cultural norm which far outweighs dealing with emotions, let alone making sure that one’s story is known.

Most people under thirty are aware that there was a war but do not know the details and their surviving parents and grand-parents are repressed at best and shamed at worst they go quiet if asked about the past and will almost certainly never volunteer to share it.

Over the course of our time in Cambodia, we asked many questions, trying to make sense of the atrocities and to grapple both with how this happened so recently and with why we had never learned about it in school.

And, in my own quiet corner, I had to deal with my own conflicted feelings -– when I saw the mass graves at Choeung Ek (one of the Killing Fields), my stomach was tied in a knot identical to the one that I had when I visited Treblinka.

And when we went to S-21, a High School-cum-torture centre, my mind conjured up images both from Majdanek and from the displays in the US Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

My first instinct was one of ownership and betrayal -– how could someone else’s genocide touch me as deeply as the Holocaust?

After an intense day of learning and feeling, I kept turning the question over and over in my mind, both trying to reconcile it and also to figure out why it bothered me at all.

I suppose that those few conversations that I’ve witnessed (and even participated in) where genocides have been compared have been tremendously uncomfortable -– questions of which was worse, how many more victims there were, who knew about it, who acted, who refused -– they have left me feeling like the winner of a contest that I’d have given anything not to have won.

All those years, I felt uncomfortable about the debates because I felt that I might be perceived as naïve, or at least biased, for viewing the Holocaust as so vastly unique or worse than history’s tragic list of other genocides.

But somehow, and embarrassingly only now, did I realize that my discomfort had nothing to do with my defence of the Holocaust itself but rather the “ranking” of genocides to begin with -– the very act minimizes the human suffering of those whose genocide is deemed to be “less horrific” than another.

It was time for me to examine the meaning of the words “never again” -– they don’t say “never again for the Jewish people”, they simply say “never again.” Ever. To anyone.

That is not to say that I don’t still believe that the Holocaust was a unique event, one which has been a defining force both in Jewish history and in world history in the 20th century.

The Holocaust is responsible for much of my personal identity as a Jew and as a person -– for my commitment to carrying on the legacy of the Shoah and also for my deep compassion for others.

In fact, it is my understanding of the Holocaust and my experiences within the Jewish community which have allowed me to arrive at where I am today.

And this year, I am a young Jewish girl who spent Yom Hashoah in Cambodia a place where I was both far away from a formal Yom Hashoah commemoration and, at the same time, where I was newly confronted with issues of how to deal with the emotions sadness, frustration, anger, fear, to name a few -– that come along with being part of a genocide legacy.

And while I honor Yom Hashoah as a day that is set aside for remembrance of the Holocaust (and no other genocide), I couldn’t keep the Cambodian genocide from creeping into my thoughts -– and my reflections surprised me.

While the day was sombre as usual, it was also inspiring for I came to appreciate (even more) that I come from a community of sharing, where we value personal experience, we prize learning and teaching and, most of all, we honour each person who experienced the Shoah privately and publicly, thoughtfully and carefully.

While I strive not to judge Cambodian society’s way of reconciling its past, I cannot help but feel sad when I see the resulting emotions of many of citizens -– they are dealing with the aftermath of the war in their own quiet ways, without the support of their community or even of their families.

In thinking about how we heal and what each person’s healing means to the world, I began to think about Tikkun Olam, the healing of the world, and my role in this mitzvah which brings more love and better understanding into the world.

For me, part of my role has had to do with being an active part of the post-Holocaust Jewish community to knowing what happened, to hearing and reading the stories, to sharing them with others, to teaching those who come after me.

This year, on Yom Hashoah, I recommitted myself to that role but I also committed myself to sharing what I have learned in Cambodia -– to tell about what has happened, to relay the stories I’ve heard and the feelings I’ve had, to bring greater understanding in the world, to help others heal, to build bridges between communities of shared experiences, to be a listening ear, to be a stand for others’ freedom, to create love in the world where there might otherwise be none, to help keep the promise of “never again.”

It’s not meant to sound self-righteous or lofty, it’s just meant to acknowledge that I’ve come to learn about tragedy in the world and cannot ignore it.

It’s an admission that I went to Cambodia with the expectation of having a “different” kind of Pesach and a quiet and uneventful Yom Hashoah.

What I saw when I looked in the mirror surprised me it wasn’t my usual Yom HaShoah reflection it was something quiet and meek yet confronting and illuminating, inviting me to give it a voice and to tell its story.