The Big Gray Truck

This introductory chapter discusses a certain type of Holocaust remembrance called “memory appropriation.” It shows how this appropriated memory of the Holocaust has become a form of “screen memory” that filters out and obfuscates any serious addressing of one's own responsibility for mass atrocity in more recent wars, but also clouds the memories that do not fit the current political moment. This remembrance of the Holocaust, then, is not exactly denial, nor is it quite the same as trivialization. As such, the chapter suggests that memory appropriation would be a more nuanced way of understanding this type of Holocaust remembrance. Here, the memory of the Holocaust is used to memorialize a different kind of suffering, such as suffering under communism, or suffering from ethnic violence perpetrated by other groups. It is Holocaust remembrance turned inward, away from the actual victims of the Holocaust or the Holocaust itself.