Soon There Will Be No Survivors: Remembering the Victims of the Holocaust

TABLET MAGAZINE
By Matthew Fishbane

Nine portraits of survivors of the Holocaust by Jason Florio

When a recent, highly publicized and debated Pew study asked, “What does being Jewish mean in America today?” an astonishing 73 percent of U.S. Jews replied that “remembering the Holocaust” was “essential to their sense of Jewishness.” To U.S. Jews, more important than any other identifying factor was this bizarre enshrinement of memory. We’ve gathered nine portraits, with short audio interviews. We are American Jews remembering the Holocaust, without forgetting its survivors. We hope you’ll take a few minutes of your time today to do so, too, by scrolling below.

• We are not the psychiatrists of Yale’s “Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies,” facing facts for the first time. 
• We are not Steven Spielberg or the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, archiving oral and visual history. 
• We aren’t a filmmaker, artist, or writer, grappling for years with the complicated moral, aesthetic, and historical legacy of the Shoah, like Claude Lanzmann, Art Spiegelman, or Aharon Appelfeld.