I was channel surfing this morning when I came across a typical piece of daytime TV -- the interview of an author of a recent book. Hannah Strom of CBS's "The Early Show" was interviewing author Hanala about her new book with the appalling title, "My Parents Went Through The Holocaust And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." On the cover, as you can see, is a depiction of a young girl throwing a tantrum while wearing the prison uniform of the Nazi concentration camps. The book is supposedly a memory of Hanala's growing up. Her parents, both Holocaust survivors, evidently had little patience with their daughter's normal childhood and adolescent crises. "Nobody likes me!" Hanala would whine. "Do you think Hitler liked me when he was chasing me through the forests of Poland"?" would come the reply.
I'm all for true stories of living with Holocaust survivors. I am not of the opinion that surviving the Holocaust makes one a saint. The Holocaust swept up the entire range of human types, and since survivors testify that making it out alive was often a matter of dumb luck, survivors of all types (including selfish people who made bad parents) survived. Art Spiegelman captured the humanity of survivors in his masterful Maus graphic novels, depicting his father's bravery and cunning in the death camps as well as his niggardliness and bigotry afterward. If Hanala's book is in the same vein, her horrid title may be understandable. But if this some snarky, nose-thumbing get-rich memoir that trivializes the Holocaust, then shame on her.
As the number of living Holocaust survivors dwindles, the temptation to lose sight of the horrors of the death camps, and of the general human capacity to build them, increases. At that point, the Holocaust deniers will have won, and the human race will only need to wait a short time before it relearns the painful lessons of World War II.
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