Collective memory, the Holocaust and social justice

Jodie*, leader of an international development volunteering charity, articulates a complex understanding of the relationship between personal, historical and textually derived narratives as illustrated by the following example, which is worth quoting at length:

“So I am in Ghana in a rural setting and I am having lunch. Lunch takes about three hours to prepare, you are just basically sitting there waiting for it because it is on a wood burning fire. It is a very rural setting. There are lots of children milling around because it is sports day. There is a big competition, they are coming and going from school. So, we are just watching that with a guy called Karamu. We are working with schools because we are doing this big project on education in Northern Ghana.

“Lunch comes. It is once again a fried fish, deep fried, with fried rice and salad. I am not allowed to eat the salad because it might have been washed in regular water and I might get cholera from it. So, I don’t eat the salad, I eat the rice, I’ve had enough of the fish. I am ultimately, a middle class, middle-aged Jewish woman from London. I have had enough of the fish after two weeks. So I leave half of it and Karamu looks at me and gives me a bit of a nudge.

“I understand at that moment, that it is unacceptable that I don’t finish my food in the context in which we are in. He sort of motions, looking at the kids. So I pick at my plate and get eye contact with a kid who is walking past and sort of look sideways and sort of with my eyes, um do you want this. He comes over and sits down, nobody says a thing, on the floor next to me, he takes my knife and fork, he takes the plate, he has a little box with a couple of mismatched crocs in it. He sits down and finishes everything on my plate, he puts the plate back on the table and off he goes.

“So I am sitting there very close to tears and I am transported to the fact that my parents, my father’s parents were in Belsen and his parents died of hunger. They died of starvation in Belsen.

“A couple of months later I am in front of [my rabbi], it’s Yom Kippur, I’ve prepped for Yom Kippur. He’s talking about Isaiah and ‘don’t give me your sacrifices, you need to feed the poor’. Oof my God, everything suddenly all makes sense, wow, the Holocaust happened to us and we died but we survived and what is our purpose in the world? I have fed the poor literally in such a real way, it’s heart breaking, and there is still poverty, and all that stuff made sense.

“For me it also helped in what is this Holocaust thing? You can feel, certainly, as a second generation [survivor], very sort of persecuted and very afraid of the world and everybody who isn’t you. And it translated it, it just sort of said – it’s not that it’s a moment and it could never happen again; that is a possibility. But there is another possibility as well, another reality. So that is what I took so I can as I said weave between these different things in order to find a more important, more traditional sense of what is our purpose.”

*All names are pseudonyms.