Not seeing Oy to Oy: The generational divide over Holocaust humour

I’ve always been a big fan of the therapeutic value of laughter but the recent piece by Larry David did not bring a smile. It brought to mind a conversation I had with my six-year-old daughter while sitting in Hong Kong’s beautiful Ohel Leah synagogue on Yom Tov many years ago. 

A lady walked in wearing very little and eyebrows were raised. I explained to my daughter that it’s fine to wear a bikini on the beach, but it isn’t appropriate to wear to shul any more than you’d go to play on the beach in a ball gown. There’s a time and a place. 

But is there ever a time and place for Holocaust humour? As the child of survivors who grew up in a survivor community in the Melbourne of the 1950s and 1960s, my answer is a very firm no.

Charlie Chaplin agrees with me. His most commercially successful film ever, The Great Dictator, satirising Hitler and Mussolini was released in 1940. In his 1964 autobiography, he wrote that had he known the true horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, he could not have made the film.

Growing up, there were other children who were often left to play with us because one of their parents had “gone to Queensland”. My sister and I noticed that these parents never came back. We ultimately understood that these parents had committed suicides as a result of PTSD after the Holocaust. In those days, these things weren’t spoken of and especially not to young children.