Updated May 4, 2021

ANTIDOTE AGAINST OBLIVION

Mari Carmen Giménez Segura⁴⁰

Barcelona

There is no human suffering that we cannot pity, because we know none of us is exempt.

Aurelio Arteta⁴¹

Translated by Zulema Seligsohn

I accept with sincere gratitude Silvio Gutkowski's generous invitation, and through him, that of the victims of Serock and their descendants, to step into the pages of this book.

I do this with intense feelings of respect and modesty. To the fact that others' memories, especially insofar as they involve suffering and pain, are inherently the intimate realm of the protagonists and their children, I must add the certain fact that my view, as Silvio pointed out, is that of an outsider. It is therefore a double intrusion: into all those that participate in the creation of The Book of Serock, and into the memory of the Jewish people, to which I do not belong.

I have no idea who imposed on us or how we constructed the rules of the game of belonging that integrates us or
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⁴⁰Doctor of Psychology. Professor Emerita of the University of Barcelona.

⁴¹Aurelio Arteta (1996). La compasión. Antologia de la virtud bajo sospecha. Paidós, Buenos Aires, pág. 93.

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excludes us, placing us alternatively among "these people" or "those people." In my case, if after having assumed the place that circumstances assigned me, I still dare to continue in this vein, it is that though my condition of being "other" thwarts my being a complete participant in the experience of "these people," nothing prevents me from the right of feeling myself with them and of them.

The texts of the compilation and the choir of voices that shape them move me profoundly. Suddenly, thanks to that collection of vital histories, a small town with no particular meaning for me is filled with life and becomes a microcosm inhabited by real beings whom I can well picture. At first they are reading, working, studying; they organize themselves, meditate, pray, love or hate each other, but then they are tortured into exhaustion, people whose families were massacred, and whose creations, projects, aspirations, and hopes were unjustly shattered. All that for the simple reason that they existed.

Even though Serock is now a town reconstructed in the memory of each author's reference to his or her origins and to their irreparable loses, The Book of Serock in its entirety delineates a mini-stage on which the shame of Europe, the most immeasurable and brutal human tragedy of the twentieth century, is actualized.

The motivation that impelled the survivors to describe the everyday life, the ups and downs of the flow of history in their town, and their own experience in the times of terror, is doubtless very strong. They wished the young people of today would walk in those streets holding hands with their grandparents, uncles, friends, about whom they knew only through the remembrance, the love of their parents; and converse with them, learn from them. But no matter how powerful the motives were, such a goal is not reached without extraordinary efforts, efforts whose result constitutes a significant contribution to the clarification of the historical truth that

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is to be admired. To evoke and relive the horror, the fear, the uncertainty, the humiliation, the barbarism, the misery, and the utter injustice; to mold into words what is unspeakable, yet to chronicle it without allowing rancor or self-pity to creep in between the lines require not just the determination to attempt an extremely difficult narrative mode, but immense fortitude and extraordinary bravery.

Paradoxically, none of the gathered autobiographical fragments reveals a sense of heroism in their authors. On the contrary, they all show themselves as run-of-the-mill people with their triumphs and their afflictions. Perhaps that is why their pain hurts us more and their vitality comforts us even more, because they are flesh and blood, like us.

I cannot fail to ask myself from what source these people found the energy to survive and the courage to explain their experience. From their community bonds? Surely, but also, I believe, from a faith without which one cannot begin to write. A kind of faith that, though not theirs exclusively, I believe is particularly rooted in Jewish culture. What I mean is the faith in the strength of words, tradition, history, and the transforming powers of their transmission.

And it is true. If history had no power to leave us naked in the face of truth, of building us up and changing us, no one in the world would have ever bothered to attempt to deny it, erase it, or bury it under the seemingly comfortable cloak of oblivion.

Because history causes us pain, others' pain hurts us; we are pained to see the proof of our capacity for evil and destruction; all of us are susceptible of falling into the temptation of forgetting. But fortunately it happens at times, and this is one of those times, that someone decides to collect the testimony of those who preceded us, to thus provide us

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the occasion to remember, to explore the fabric of our being, to take upon ourselves that which survives from the past and becomes renewed in us; and which because of self-esteem, respect for our elders, because of morality, fidelity, and love we will bequeath to the coming generations.

Thank you, Silvio, for this antidote to oblivion.

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