Death camp humour

In 1986, I was a member of a group of teachers sent to visit Auschwitz and other concentration camp sites as well as Yad Vashem in Israel. We were a mixed group of Jews and non-Jews, as one of the latter I found it difficult to respond to the stream of Holocaust jokes produced by the Jews. One example. While we were travelling on a train in Poland, one of our group said he was going to write to the Polish railway authority to congratulate them on how much their service had improved since his parents were passengers on the railway in the 1940s.

Later, I spoke to a very thoughtful Jewish member of our party. I told him I found this attitude difficult to comprehend. He told me that he belonged to an educational committee dealing with Holocaust education and that before their meetings, they invariably had a session in which they told each other Holocaust jokes. I gathered it was a mixture of defiance of the Nazi attempt to obliterate them and a token of membership in the group. Non-members like myself could sympathize — but we could never belong. Barbara Kay mentions how author Ruth Wisse encourages other cultures to adopt the Jewish practice of self-lampooning. However, there’s a very good reason why, say, Muslims are unlikely to “take up joking about Muhammad” or “Arabs (to) satirize jihad” — and Ms. Wisse mentions it herself earlier in the book. She writes: “Ideologues do not welcome levity. Joking flourishes among those who sustain contrarieties, tolerate suspense, and perhaps even relish insecurity.”

I think late, unlamented ideologue, the Ayatollah Khomeini, (who would never be mistaken for a Don Rickles or Shecky Greene) put it best when he observed vis-à-vis tragedy being easy and comedy being hard: “There are no jokes in Islam.” For comedic effect, feel free to add a rimshot to that one. With all respect to Barbara Kay, Auschwitz was not an “infamous Polish death camp” — it was in occupied Poland. As a Polish-Canadian I feel offended by that wording.