racial memory.

today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the auschwitz-birkenau concentration camps. it's an odd day to be jewish, for me. it's really amazing to me how the holocaust has become so fundamental to the jewish identity in the last 60 years, and yet at the same time, we recognize it was just another in the long history of persecution.

when i was probably too young for it, my mother showed me pictures of the camps, and of the people in the camps. if you've never seen them...i don't know if i can describe how it feels (especially when you're about 8 years old) to be looking at what is basically a skeleton with skin on it and be told, "that could have been you." or rather, "this was done to them because they were just like you." i can't remember anymore if the national holocaust museum in washington dc has pictures like that. if they do, i'm sure they're in one of those displays behind ~4 foot high walls so little kids can't get traumatized.

what's really strange is that i've never heard that any of my family died in the camps, although i'm pretty sure they probably did. by about 1920, all of my immediate family (which is to say, my great-grandparents) was in the states, so if we had relatives who were taken by the nazis, they would have been more distant. and i've been lucky enough to never personally have been on the receiving end of anti-semitism. and yet, the apprehension of hatred or persecution is still built in. so you have this collective memory built up behind you that makes you get nervous when you put the hannukah candles on the kitchen table in front of a window. or something as simple as doing your grocery shopping becomes an act of defiance because you walk up to the supermarket counter with a cart full of boxes and cannisters stamped "kosher for passover." and then you kick yourself for being ridiculous and you insist that nobody is going to notice, nobody is going to care, we're in the u.s. of freaking a. in the 21st century, dammit. stop tearing your clothes.

and then you see the pictures, and you remember your mother's sister sold her house because of an anti-semetic neighbour. and maybe the jumpiness is justified.