fluffernutter8 | Entries tagged with judaism: yom hashoa

To forget a holocaust is to kill twice
Elie Weisel

Today (probably yesterday by the time of posting) is Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which means that it's time for my annual Holocaust post.

The fact that I'm posting the day after is accidental (I had a bit of A Day) but meaningful nevertheless. This afternoon when I went by the plaza, a central place on campus where volunteers spend nine hours reading the names of people who died in the Holocaust, to listen to the reading and to light a candle and think for a moment, and this evening when I went back for the ceremony of candlelighting and kaddish, I noticed how small the crowd was. I suppose it was big enough for a Monday evening with a chilly breeze close to the end of the semester at an event with no free products or food to entice busy college students, but what really bothered me was the fact that even on the day when people are supposed to take a minute to remember, so many people didn't seem to have the time. And I wondered how this attitude was going to transform as I have children and grandchildren. Because I've been hearing it since I was a kid: the survivors are dying, and these next few years are probably going to be the last ones where people can meet and speak in person to people who experienced the Holocaust. One of the best ways to engage people is through personal stories, for them to look into the eyes of a person who tells them something that they don't want to believe or think about, and to be forced to say, "I will remember after you are gone." Knowing survivors and hearing about the things that they lost and the things that they will never forget has an impact like no other. I don't remember ever learning about my grandfather's past; every memory I have of him is with the knowledge that something terrible had happened to him, and that it had shaped him and his entire life. The Holocaust is an event of tremendous, indisputable importance, for persecuted and murdered individuals (Jews, Romani, Soviets, gay men, people who were disabled, among many other groups) and those who remained behind, and even for international history and politics. But it is also as a lesson for us and the future, and I am so afraid that that sense of gravity is being lost with the people who suffered such grave losses.

The only thing I can think of to help this is to pass on the story, to remember the Holocaust not just on one day a year, but on every day. To let the significance of the Holocaust not be forgotten, to let the signs of slow-creeping, ever-growing oppression be apparent to us when we see them in our own world. To commit ourselves to the memory and to bear the truth and the weight of what happened forward as living history.

But beware and watch yourself very well, lest you forget the things that your eyes saw, and lest these things depart from your heart, all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children and to your children's children,
Deuteronomy 4:9

In the Jewish calendar, today is the nineteenth day of the month of Nissan. That means that it's Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Which means it's time for my annual Yom HaShoa post.

When I think about how the Holocaust affects my life, I think of my abba's father, my saba. His story is the glaring one. He lived through the Holocaust. His family fled their home to escape deportation, but were caught and deported anyway. My great-grandfather died in an accident: while trying to build a shelter for the family, a beam collapsed and fell toward my grandfather. His dad pushed him out of the way and was crushed instead. By working and planning, he managed to keep himself, his mom and his brother alive.

All of these pieces had to work together for me to be alive today. What if they had just been killed instead of marched to Transnistria? What if he had been killed by the beam? What if they had gotten typhus or one of the other diseases that were running rampant, or had frozen or starved?

This is the natural, obvious place that my mind goes on days like this. But there are more parts to my past than that.

Last week was Passover and I ditched school for a week (what, I did all the work to make it up!) to be with my family. At one of the meals, I was telling my dad about an article that I had read about kosher food on the Titanic and other luxury ships of the time. I mentioned that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society records talk about it. Usually my dad would tell me about a related article that he read, but instead he looked at his mother, my bubbe, and said, "Ma, tell the story of how your dad came to Canada."

I had never heard this story. My grandfather kind of overshadowed it. But here is the story that she told:
Her father lived in Russia. In 1913, he was almost sixteen. On the night of Purim (when we celebrate the rescue of the Jews from the plot of Haman) his mother came to him. She was concerned because he was getting older and- oh, fun little postscript- since the 1840s, all Jewish men got conscripted into the Russian army. With this in mind, she obtained a Canadian visa though a friend who had already emigrated, and bribed a soldier to let him out of town. So that night, he headed off to hear the megilla (the story of Purim) and instead slipped out of town and left his family (he never saw them again) and took a ship to Canada. He arrived in Philadelphia on the first day of Passover. He didn't get off because he was bound for Canada, but women from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society came aboard and brought them matzah. A few days later, he got off at the port in Halifax.

Later that year, my great-grandmother and her family landed in Canada as well. By "her family," I mean her, her parents and her sisters. They left her brothers back in Romania for a little while because what they were most concerned about was not the boys going to the army, but the girls being kidnapped and raped. So they needed to wait and raise money to bring the boys over.

These aren't Holocaust stories. Somehow, these are the stories of the people who got out of Europe. Antisemitism was something that was sickeningly prevalent before the Holocaust. Many strong Jewish leaders from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Jews who didn't identify as such until they witnessed the commonality of antisemitism. Ze'ev Jabotinsky reported on the Kishinev pogrom. Theodor Herzl reported on the Dreyfus Affair (where the French army basically looked at a list of people who had the access to military secrets to sell to the Germans, and accused Alfred Dreyfus because he MUST be the one. After all, you know how Jews aren't loyal to their countries and should never have been in the army in the first place).

I think what really most bothers me (possibly because it actually affects my life currently) is that antisemitism isn't gone today. One of my really good friends here at school, a really sweet, smart girl from Oklahoma, told me that she was taught that food in America is so expensive because the Jews charge lots of money to make it kosher. She didn't overhear this on the street or get told on the playground by some asshole kid. She was taught that in her public high school classroom by a teacher.

And the worst part of it is that no one spoke up, because they didn't know any better or because they were scared or because they didn't care. Today from 10 AM until 7 PM, Hillel set up speakers and a podium in a very main part of campus. It was a beautiful day and there were lots of students outside, walking past or sitting around. They had a rotation of speakers there, faculty and students, and for nine hours, they just read from a giant binder of names of people who died. They had to use a ruler to keep track because the type was so small. I was there for only twenty minutes, and it was oppressive. "Aaron Levin, Abraham Levin, Adelle Levin, Alexander Levin..." No biographical information, place or dates of birth or death, just the list of names. Nine hours. Unrelenting. And people barely stopped.

So share. There are plenty of people who don't have anyone left to tell their stories. You can remember them, so this is never forgotten.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Today at sundown I finished my homework and sat in my bedroom, looking out my windows. I wondered if seventy years ago there were some other girl, maybe my age, with dark hair and dark eyes, who liked reading, who was sitting in her room in some house in Germany or Austria, thinking about her schoolwork and if she would be going to college and if she would have a career and when she would get married. And it made me sad- foolishly, simply, childishly sad- to think that I will get to do these things and this made up girl didn't get to finish any of those things.

And then I got up and went to shul.

Sundown marked the beginning of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Every year my family goes to the Yom HaShoah commemoration speech at my synagogue. The Holocaust goes deep in my family, at least on my father's side. My mother's family lived in New York and Boston since the turn of the century and my Bubbe (my grandmother, my father's mother) had roots in Montreal going back two decades by the time Hitler came around. But my Saba's family lived in a tiny village in Romania (it's called Stroznitz, but that's not important) for generations and that was bad news when the Nazis came around. You can read more about that story here.

Because of our family history, my dad is called up every year at the ceremony to light one of the six candles that represent the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Every year, there is a different speaker. Sometimes it's a survivor, sometimes just a researcher or historian. This year it was an American soldier who helped liberate Dachau. He told us some awful stories- about how General Patton threw up from the smell of the camps, about his company running across a Dachau subcamp for gypsies where the Germans burned the barracks with the prisoners inside and machine-gunned anyone who managed to escape when they saw that the Americans were coming- but the thing that stuck in my mind was something he said about Buchenwald. He said that when the soldiers got there, the SS had already left, they had abandoned the camp, but before they did, they shut off the water and drained the reservoir. And what struck me was the hatred those officers must have felt to subject the people in that camp. That they could watch them for years, suffering and slaving and starving and getting sick and weak and that it still wasn't enough for them. That they were so impassioned with the need to kill off these people who had done nothing to them, nothing but exist, that they would give them one last torturous horror to remember them by before they died in agony from starvation and dehydration and disease.

I refuse to believe that people are born evil, hating sociopaths. If I believe that, I will lose faith in humanity and believe that the people I know are the exceptions to the "humans are evil" rule. I must believe that people were and are convinced of the subhumanity of others and that allowed them to persuade themselves that what they were doing was acceptable. Therefore, I have to say that we have to stop hating each other.

It sounds so simple. But go back thousands of years and people just hate other people. And everyone should realize that people aren't better than others. That's wrong. There are people who are better than other people. To clarify: There are individuals who are better than other individuals. Mother Teresa is better than Osama bin Laden. But no group of people can say that another group of people is worse or has less of a right to live or be free based on their gender or race or appearance or what they like to watch on tv.

This post turned out a lot less articulately than I wanted it to, but I think I got what I wanted to say across.
Saying this won't change anything, but someone once told me that it is better to say what you mean, even if probably won't help, than to stay silent and make sure that it won't help.

I'm going to end with two quotes that might be dismissed because of their sources, but which I'm quoting because they tie in very well with what I want to say:
"A person's a person, no matter how small."- Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss. Never forget that every person, no matter how different from you, can put their fingers to their wrist and find their pulse beating there.

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."- Yoda, Star Wars Episode I (it goes against everything I believe in to quote something called The Phantom Menace, but there you go.) Don't let your fear of things that are different or that you can't understand allow you to make those things less human. People allowed that to happen before- they let Hitler tell them that the Jews would take all their money and make off with German women- and it led to such suffering that the people who were at the camps can still recall the stench sixty-five years later.

It is late and I am tired. I have work to do tomorrow, decisions to make, life to live. I am especially thankful to have that life tonight, because I so easily could not.