At the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the importance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau has been vividly brought to life through a Memory Makers project.
Stephen Fry is one of nine artists who have been paired with Holocaust and Genocide survivors as part of the Memory Makers project in which survivors’ stories are brought to life using different art forms.
Fry met Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch who told him about her time in the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra and this is what they produced.
Smashed shopfront after Kristallnacht, image courtesy of the Wiener Library
“In the end we can get lost in the history and lost in the search for meaning. That is why people like Anita matter so much.
I come from my meetings with Anita having learned three lessons. First that a lack of self-pity is amongst the finest and noblest of all human attributes. Anita does not want to repeat and relive the story of how she suffered and what suffering she witnessed. That, for her, is not any kind of answer. The answer is to remember not so much what happened as how it happened. The years of propaganda that led perfectly ordinary people to perform acts of perfectly extraordinary evil. Second, she would add too I think, there are problems that arise from the pliable obedient nature of a people who do not question authority. It is more than a good thing to question authority, it is a necessary thing. How appalling an irony of history it is that the people who gave us Immanuel Kant should have turned its back on his enlightenment and dived into so dreadful a darkness.
Third, if there are to be no more death-camps, gas chambers or machete genocides then we must keep our ears alert to the language of hatred, the mad language that allows pitiless killing, the language that dehumanises both the victim and the perpetrator.
If that leans us towards a politically correct intolerance of racial, sexual or any other kind of abusive language, well then so be it.” (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, 2015)
The rest of Stephen Fry’s thoughts on his time with Anita, including video of his visit, can be seen at http://keepthememoryalive.hmd.org.uk/story/stephen-fry-meets-anita-lasker-wallfisch/. The other eight survivor stories can also be found.