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Yishai Sarid | Althazarius , CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons work . Sometimes it is their behaviour he despises : for instance , the adolescents ’ use and abuse of social networks during visits , or the mindless way that some of them take photographs , selfies included . In many other cases , though , a much deeper issue is at stake , which is to do with the education they have received inside the Israeli national educational system . Our protagonist senses an excess of patriotic fanaticism in which he sees himself as a cog in a great industrial machine .
We should see this latter point as a criticism of the way in which the duty of memory is managed , the way in which the indispensable task of analysing and understanding the past becomes merely part of an obligatory curriculum . Our protagonist struggles with the contradiction that obliges him to act as a guide in front of an audience of schoolchildren whose motivation is zero and who hardly ever provide any response that would help him feel that his work was worthwhile . Sometimes he hears pernicious comments about how Israel should learn from the Germans in order to fight the Arabs , or how weak the Ashkenazi Jews were to allow themselves to be treated in such a way by the Nazis .
The monster of memory forces our protagonist to take part in this trivialization of the Holocaust , to put up with these adolescents and their disrespectful behaviour . In fact , though , none of the groups he shows round , however select and elevated , are free of blame . When he accompanies a senior Israeli official , the minister of transport , on a tour , he realizes that his guest is far more concerned about the chance for a photo session than about the visit itself . Piotr Ciwinsky , director of the Auschwitz- Birkenau memorial museum , recently warned of this misuse of the places of memory of the Holocaust by the political class for propaganda purposes ; if politicians see their visits as photo opportunities , he noted ironically , how can we expect adolescents not to take selfies at the camps , especially when these photos are an essential part of their audiovisual code of communication ?
Through the reflections of the protagonist , Sarid bravely poses some complex questions that , in a way , point to the heart of the contradictions of the
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Observing Memories ISSUE 4