Rethinking the Jews and In the Death Camp

★ Jagongbi Book Club Review / Mimi

Meeting place: Online voice room

Participants: Mimi, dpg, Tiberius, Born to Run, S Mori, Seonhyeong, Jayu

Reading Seeing the Jews Properly (Moses Ryu, Duranno) and Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl, Cheonga Publishing), I came to encounter the existence of “the Jews” not merely as an ethnic category, but as a historical condition and a stratum of thought.

Because Jews are not people we easily encounter in our everyday sphere of life, we come to perceive them through others’ descriptions or through media.

That knowledge is often fragmentary, or else excessively abstracted into overly erudite concepts.

So I think there is a gap between knowing Jews as “information” and briefly entering into their time and circumstances.

At our “Jagongbi,” a wide variety of books are usually discussed, and I found myself wondering whether Jews might stand at the crossroads of the ideas and the political and economic debates we read and discuss.

In the history of modern revolution and capital, religion and secularism, tragedy and reconstruction, the Jews have existed as more than a single people—

as both a condensation and an expansion of human history.

I have always wanted to understand Jews, and the long and wide-ranging phenomena derived from them, more accurately,

so I am grateful to Mori for introducing these books to us.

Recently, several members of “Jagongbi” have been attending the 3rd Free Leader Academy, and discussion of the “Fifth Republic” has been especially lively.

I did not take part in it,

but while watching that energy with interest—and even teasing them by calling it the “Jeon Dugwang religion”—I want to convey that my heart holds genuine respect and affection.

Reexamining a historical judgment one already assumes to be firmly settled is more powerful than one might think. It is not an attempt to glorify or defend someone, but an effort to see the truth rather than the surface. I find a certain elegance in that effort to step one pace closer to the event itself, and I regard those attempts as valuable.

I once traveled around Berlin and several other cities, tracing the remnants of the Holocaust. I could not decide what emotion I was supposed to feel. Even solemnity felt like a prescribed reaction. Still, I tried to preserve it in my memory for a long time.

My reason for watching films like The Zone of Interest and The Photographer of Mauthausen is similar. I cannot simply pass by without seeing them. I cannot bring myself to use words like “understanding” or “empathy” for that suffering.

A tragedy beyond human imagination, a tragedy in which conscious human beings die piled layer upon layer like skeletons, a tragedy in which loved ones... endure that same suffering and death—can such things be measured even in imagination?

Man’s Search for Meaning takes me to a deep level of human essence.

Frankl speaks of the “last freedom” that remains to human beings even under extreme conditions.

Even when everything is taken away and physical force governs human will and choice, he says that a human being can still choose his attitude.

That was “meaning.”

That even in a place where everything has been stripped away, a person can still find “meaning,”

that this “value” itself protects me.

I deeply agreed with those words, and I welcomed that explanation, because it resembled a way of thinking I have long held. I, too, have long believed that the force that moves human beings is “meaning.”

“Dignity” is the value I consider most important in ordinary life.

I try to protect my dignity, and when I feel it is damaged, I become angry.

How is “dignity” preserved in circumstances where dignity is difficult to sustain?

If a human being can find that “meaning” even in a situation without dignity, then that person can possess “dignity.”

Just as Jesus, stripped naked and nailed to the cross, is holy because of the “meaning” his death carried.

Perhaps thinking about the existence of Jews, looking again at the historical scene of the Fifth Republic,

tracing the remnants of the Holocaust, and watching heavy films all begin from the same point.

It is a process of asking what kind of human being I will remain.

Trying to understand before judging, enduring complexity instead of simplification, and choosing memory over forgetting.

It is the process of finding new “meanings” within that.

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Original title: <유대인 바로보기>, <죽음의 수용소에서>

Author: Jayujuui Ipmun Dokseotoronmoim

Date: 2026-02-13

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=1&idx=28608