Copy link

Records of the Holocaust experience and the “perspective of tomorrow” (PL/EN)

02.07.2022 - 16:00 / Festival Tent, ul. Józefa 36 | Live: 31.jewishfestival.pl

The experience of the Holocaust can be summed up in the phrase of “descending into the abyss”: from being locked up in ghettos through successive circles of repression, violence, rape, hunger, disease, exhaustion, to the lowest and final circle: the mass graves of the victims of mass executions in the East, which Patrick Desbois calls Holocaust by Bullets, and gas chambers, crematoria and burning pits. In this context, I have examined certain fragments of selected Holocaust testimonies written there and then. I look for something in these records that can be described as “the perspective of tomorrow”. I wonder how at the time of the extermination of the Jews, stripped of the past and the future, drowned in the abyss of the extreme now, the perspective of “tomorrow” may be revealed, understood both literally – as the next day, and metaphorically – as the distant or near future. Tomorrow then is also our today. The future is our present, which we must read today as another turn of the vicious circle of repetition: from genocide to genocide, from Hitler to Putin. The cliche “Never again” has become a gloomy memento for our generation.

FREE
ENTRY