[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Joy Vriens]

Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> The alternative is that no one would have come out of the camps alive. That
> would have been wrong and unnecessary. The remainder of their lives were
> certainly impacted, but they had lives, produced families, had children and
> grandchildren, etc., who not only could help dispel the poison, but perhaps
> help others not repeat this again with still others. We are all haunted by
> their memories because they survived as witnesses with memory. Surviving is
> difficult.

Yes I have been very directly made aware of this through my mother and
her family, who have always stayed in contact with the survivors of the
families that stayed and met in my grandparent's house during WWII. The
already traumatising events she witnessed as a young girl were only the
beginning of much worse to come for the direct victims, perhaps
culminating in the sadistic moral choices imposed on those who went to
the camps, the lowest form of torture, aiming the destruction of their
souls.

To serve that memory properly, Christianity has a lot more soul
searching to do than it has done until now. There still is too much
mythology around everywhere. Memory can only fullfil its complete
function, i.e. to avoid repetition, if all causes and responsibilities
have been recognised, without making it a blame game.

E.g. My brother and a philosopher friend of his discovered by chance
that the village in which they live, Vauvert in the South of France,
used to be called Posquières and that there was an important Talmudic
school (led by Abraham ben David of Posquieres known as Rabad) in the
12th century with app. 300 students at one point.  After the plague (for
  which the "deicide jews" were blamed) and when the Southern regions
(Languedoc) were annexed by France, the Jews were expulsed or forcefully
converted to catholicism and their schools closed down. The name of
Posquières disappeared at that same period and the former Posquières
took on the name of the neighbouring village Vauvert. The  whole memory
of the Jewish presence and of an important teacher as Rabad has been
totally erased from the memory of this small town which has a large part of
extreme right voters and that prides itself of its bull-fighting tradition.
My brother and his friend have started a non-religious foundation to
bring back this (as it seems almost purposely erased) memory and have a
small museum and statue of Rabad erected. This is only a small exemple
of something which took place in many places of Christian Europe. And 
antisemitism is one of the projects of memory preservation of 
restauration. There are of course many others.

Joy