Now the experience is at hand. We are seated in a packed lecture hall and are surrounded by eminent Holocaust scholars from around the world. The focus of this session is on preserving memories of the Holocaust through education. We are hearing from experts on preservation of collective memories. I am in familiar and safe academic territory. The discussion keeps pace with the tempo of the conference as people exchange views about model curricula. But now a survivor from Canada rises to ask her question. She is plainspoken, with a strong European accent, her questions direct and hard hitting. “What can be done to get young people to notice danger signals of prejudice and extremism? How do we take action to prevent evils like the Holocaust in the future?”

Suddenly, I am flooded with memories of another survivor with a heavy accent and direct manner, my late mother. I hear her determined voice clearly. “Eva, you have to make sure you notice problems before others do. You have to write letters to newspapers, to congressmen, and to senators. They listen to young people.” But I am returned to reality as I listen to panelists responding to the survivor’s questions. One speaker advocates giving guest lectures in fellow professors’ classes in history and literature. Another panelist adds that model syllabi on genocide are solutions to preventing future genocides. The session is ended, and speakers congratulate one another on a job well-done.

But I am unable to identify with the academic response. I am a survivor now, feeling deeply in my heart that they have all missed the point. None of the panelists had thought about the survivor’s questions outside the academic box. I attempt to share my reaction with fellow academics during the coffee break; they nod politely and go back to studying the program. We are in different places.

Organizers of this Holocaust conference made a valiant effort to gather participants from diverse scholarly disciplines and diverse personal backgrounds at the meeting. I was pleased to connect with a gay activist, a community leader of Armenian background, a woman working with young German descendants of perpetrators, and a director of a Holocaust museum in Japan. My survivor instincts help me appreciate their sincere and concerned voices about the Holocaust. They appear authentic in sharing their human reactions to the perpetration of evil against human beings.

However, at the next session, there is a disturbing undercurrent of cynicism and hostility. The legitimate discussions about the enormity and even incomprehensibility of genocide give way to far less benign viewpoints. There are a number of thinly veiled and cleverly packaged statements by panelists that undermine the legitimacy of “remembering for the future.” I hear references to the Holocaust as a new religion, which needs “taming,” and concerns about the growth of the “Holocaust industry.” One panelist proposes that our major problem in “how we remember” is created by survivors who view perpetrators as “ex” monsters when, “in fact”, perpetrators had mostly been insignificant functionaries in a vast bureaucracy. Another speaker questions why there would be any need to remember the Holocaust in the long run. The academic moderator does not get involved and simply thanks each speaker for his comments. At first I bravely put on my academic hat and argue to myself that in an assembly of scholars, all viewpoints deserve a full hearing. But as a survivor I feel in my bones that the cold analysis and unimpassioned “objectivity” of many academic speakers disguises an absence of human compassion in encountering suffering by victims of genocide.

Why do these academic speakers bemoan survivors’ harsh views of perpetrators? Why do these scholars avoid speaking against genocides or bigotry in the future? We know that during the Holocaust there were victims, bystanders, and perpetrators. Here, at this “scientific” conference, there are deniers, deconstructionists and those who get involved, only to blame the victims. To a survivor, “intent” within intellectual discourse becomes important. You need to know that debates and disagreements are not intended to dishonor, divert, trivialize, or re-victimize targets of genocide. So finally, with my heart beating loudly, I raise my hand and ask my question.

I identify myself as a sociologist and also as a child survivor. I ask if members of the panel think that an “alien” arriving at this session from Planet X and listening to these papers would come away with any knowledge about the original goals of the Holocaust. Would our alien visitor be able to discern any moral outrage among our speakers about the perpetration of genocide? There is sporadic applause from around the room. But there is no comment from the podium. After the session, several survivors approach me to shake my hand, to say thank you, or just ask for my business card. An elderly man walking with a cane remarks, “We need each other.” I too feel that I need to be with other survivors, so next I decide to attend a workshop for child survivors.

The workshop takes place in a small classroom. Approximately twenty participants sit in a circle with two clinicians as group leaders. I feel a bit exposed as I look around the room. What does it mean for me to participate in this workshop? Are we here to bare our souls in front of the curious, or are we safe among fellow survivors?

Several child survivors talk about their lost childhoods and feelings of despair as they find that they are still unable to come out of hiding. A British woman, born in the Budapest Ghetto, talks about her feelings of loss and loneliness, as she had no one from her family of origin to share the joy at her sons’ Bar Mitzvahs. I resonate to her comments. Only two weeks earlier our son had been married at a wonderful celebration. I now hear myself telling my story to the group. “I wanted so much to share this great joy with people from my past, with family who knew me as a child. But I couldn’t. Among the 200 wedding guests I had only one relative, a cousin from my side of the family. I know the Holocaust left me bereft of family. There is a brief pause in the session. The British woman (a magistrate, I later learn) rises from her seat, comes toward me, and flings her arms around me in a big bear hug of fellowship. Later at dinner we share feelings, we share memories, and we share a common worldview. Our connection is amazing for two women who have lived their lives in different corners of the world. We are “remembering for the future” as only fellow survivors can.