Lost and Gone Away by Jenner Lynn

Author:Jenner, Lynn [Jenner, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Maps and guides

Recently I found this particular diagrammatic version of Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’.23 Abraham Maslow, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, created the hierarchy in America during the 1940s to explain the conditions people need to be as happy and creative as they can possibly become.

Maslow’s theory is that deficits in the needs on the bottom of the pyramid motivate human beings to try and satisfy those needs before meeting those on the top. The hierarchy works from the assumption that the needs lower down are more important than the needs higher up. Twice in the last year I have heard that listening to poetry was important to some people in the ghettos but, past a certain point of hunger, nothing was as important as food. Behind the theory and the diagram there is a sense of instinctual striving from the bottom and the possibility of upward movement.

The hierarchy itself has been described in all sorts of ways and used for all sorts of purposes since the 1940s but it is always about people striving to make their lives better.

*

It is almost a convention for museums about the Holocaust to have dark grey walls. Often the Holocaust exhibit pathway follows the process of genocide in chronological order – it begins with identification, then exclusion and violence, proceeds to confinement in ghettos and concludes with the journey to a camp.

At the end of that journey there is immediate death by suffocation or selection for work, which meant slow death. Suffocation is so much the symbol of the Holocaust that sixty years later, members of a Nationalist group in Ukraine make a hissing noise when they want to threaten people by evoking this event.24

I notice that the process of genocide attacked the Jews from the top of the hierarchy – burned their art and books, locked them out of universities, and then took away their positions and their titles. Think of all the stories of doctors who couldn’t practise and teachers who couldn’t teach. Then it stopped them belonging to groups and alienated people from each other – neighbours who used to be friendly stopped speaking and people were driven to sending their children away or leaving old people behind as they fled. Then it proceeded to take down the formal and informal structures of law and safety. And finally, it took away their food and their rest and, last of all, their air.

There was no way for these people to come back. After the war, their neighbours said as much.

we will not let you in

this is our house now

you were sent to a concentration camp,

you were not expected to come back.25

Sometimes a museum represents this by making the physical space close in as the process nears its end. Sometimes the museum keeps shoes or spectacles or leaves as a symbol of all who died. The museums I visit all show that a tiny group of people survived, spread across the world, even coming this far, and that they wanted most of all to build families.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.