I wanted to post in respect to the Korman family who danced at Auschwitz, because I they did a good thing.

Does it seem to you that there are always people waiting for any given event, any news story, just waiting for it to break so that they can sit there and judge and scorn? So that they can tisk and tut and say that other people are insensitive? It seems that way to me, sometimes, and it’s not something I like.

The Daily Mail struck me as being one of the above mentioned types when I heard the news earlier this month of the family who made a video of themselves dancing at different locations across Poland associated with the Holocaust.

When I first saw this video I thought it was excellent. I thought the family in question was brave and that they were doing a good thing. I can’t imagine it was easy for them to do this, to be at those places with the history, the severely oppressing history, all around you, and turn on a disco song and dance. But that’s what they did, and the did it for a good reason. Jane Korman, the artist behind the video and daughter of Adolek Korman, an 89 year old survivor of Auschwitz, felt that people needed to be reminded of the lessons learned in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and that the images people usually see have in a way desensitised them to what happened and what we need to take away from what happened.

So often we focus on all the lives that were lost in concentration camps all across Europe during the Holocaust, but it’s equally important to focus on those who survived. Those who made it out of those death camps. As Adolek, the elderly patriarch of the family seen dancing in the video, who was imprisoned at the Auschwitz camp, said during an interview with the BBC “we are alive, we survived, we are dancing to the song of survival”. He later said in the interview when asked about the video being seen by hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube “I think it is wonderful that so many people looked at it, of course not everyone can understand why we dance in Auschwitz…

There are certainly a lot of naysayers about this artwork, but I think they’ve missed the point. A comment from a Polish person to the YouTube video said that “this has caused us much pain; Nothing more than silence is needed in these places where they filmed” but I disagree. I think that if a survivor of the camp can come back and dance, then other people should be able to understand, appreciate, and respect what it is to turn and face the worst of humanity and boldly say ‘I survived’. Adolek’s response to this comment was that it was hard to know how to respond “…but again, we survived, we created a generation, a new generation, a beautiful generation” and I think that’s so eloquent and really all that needs to be said.

I remain, celebrating the wonder of life,

Morgan D