Too early for Hitler

It's really hard to watch "Shoah" at 9 in the morning. That's what S had me do today. She wanted me to transcribe a letter that someone reads from a man who was told about the camps by an "eye-witness" who escaped. "Shoah," if you don't know, is Hebrew for annihilation and is about, of course, the Holocaust. The whole thing is 9 hours (!) long but we only watched about 20 minutes on one of the four tapes. Anyway, I felt strange as I wrote out this letter on blank typing paper with a ballpoint pen. Suddenly, this poor man, his words were being filtered through my handwriting. It was unnerving in some way, as if by writing his letter in my own hand, I was obscuring his history. His last line is, "Creator of the universe, help us!"

Later, we did research on her computer and read about the German composer Wagner, whom Hitler loved (but not as much as Beethoven). He wasn't around during Hitler's time, but Wagner was a huge antisemite who wrote a book about how the Jews were degrading music. S wanted to know more about musicians who were heralded by Hitler and those who were banned, so we read about Jewish musicians who were forced to leave in 1933, and people like Strauss who wrote several compositions for the Third Reich. At different points in my reading, both S and I got teary. It doesn't matter how many times I've heard these kind of stories about the Holocaust, they still affect me, and leave me dumbfounded.