My journey through Yad Vashem
יד ושם
Welcome to my journey through Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum and Memorial. It’s going to be a difficult experience.
Focus on the heart.
Yad Veshem, located a couple hours’ drive from Tel-Aviv, is meant to make you, the visitor, feel uncomfortable. I knew it wouldn’t be easy.
Instead of suppressing the grief, I’m going to let myself feel it, as I comes through me, no resistance. I’ll allow it. I won’t carry this pain with me.
Release. Love. I can’t help but to summon the heart meditation of Jesus, the burning candle of infinite love. I am grateful to have all of these experiences in my life that allow me to be aware of these avatars of infinite love.
Yad Vashem is a mostly underground space that follows a narrow, peaked triangular cavern, criss-crossed by perpendicular passageways that enter and exit the center hall.
Rooms on either side of the triangular hall are filled with displays and pictures.
early propaganda and books on rocks readied for flames greet visitors as they begin the long journey through the rise of Nazism.
Photo by Anders Jacobsen
This image is regularly seen in accounts of children survivors. Source unknown.
Is love all we need?
Now what do we do with the experience of learning about the darkness of the Holocaust? What will we do to accept it and bring with us the lessons that serve us, instead of wallowing in this endless sadness?
What will I learn today that will serve us, that we don’t already know? I’ve studied WWII, I’ve cried in my own capacity over the collective loss of six million people, I’ve imagined the entire families lost and seen images of the suffering of those who perished and those who survived.
I recall my “friend” in journal writing, Anne Frank, whose experienced in hiding we shared.
We know we should not allow dictators to ascend into power, we know that harming each other is inhuman, we understand life is to be cherished and others, no matter their background, are to be respected and cherished, no matter their beliefs. We have learned these fundamental tenants of life on this earth, in this universe. We can’t forget.
How can we contemplate these lessons today?
Our bus is now in Jerusalem, high in the sandy taupe rocks, above the flat landscape of Tel Aviv, beyond the green fields of crops that nourish this country’s people and us.
This is the holy city.
Yad Vashem is located on the western side of Mount Herzl, near the Jerusalem forest. Tall pines rise like stalagmites and spiny bushes reach toward the sun. The Mount of Remembrance, flush with rosemary bushes, is nearby.
Toward the entrance of Yad Vashem is a monument to the names of every victim for generations, a place to study and reflect.
“Where books are burned, human beings are also destined to be burned.” – Heinrich Heine
I am scared. Hatred breeds so fast.
I’m reading postcards from a mother and father to their son, Heinz, 6, who they sent to London at the onset of the rise of the Nazi party. There exists profound love in these cold walls: Their compassion for Heinz, their messages of love adorn joyous images of spring greetings, masking darkness growing inside the borders of Germany.
There were millions of Jews in Poland, and the paternal side of my family is Polish. I wonder if my family was tortured, immobilized, humiliated and murdered. My great-grandparents lived in the U.S before the Nazi occupation, but that doesn’t mean their friends and families were safe.
“A country is not just what it does, it is also what it tolerates.” – Kurt Tucholsky
From Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi: “All of Europe has turned into a monster.”
The Lodz Chronicles tell day-to-day stories of life in the second-largest ghetto of the Nazi occupation. The ghettos were places designed to isolate Jewish communities, starve their people through food “rations,” while the government burned to the ground synagogues, forced Jews on trains, and then killed them.
A pile of books representing those burned before the Holocaust.
Photo by Daniel Julio
Barbed-wire fences at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
PHOTO BY MARCIN CZERNIAWSKI
JANUSZ KORCZAK. Source: WIKIPEDIA.
My heart palpitates with energy I’ve never felt.
I am getting hungry, but I feel no need to eat as I listen to and read the words of those starving and suffering in the ghettos.
We leave the ghettos and enter the shooting pits in the forest, the Ponary massacre site in Lithuania.
All that remains are poems, pictures, songs, paintings and some scarves.
I have a feeling of heat rising up through my throat. I want to vomit. I’m watching stills from a movie showing firing squads mowing down lines of men, after the victims dug their own graves. There are mountains of clothes.
Now we are passing train tracks to Auschwitz. I’m still nauseous.
I’ve come upon a man dedicated to the pure love for children: Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), a Warsaw pediatrician and children’s author. He spent years insulating the children of his orphanage from the nightmares outside, to give them as normal life as possible. His life was marked by an egalitarian attitude toward children and orphans, and he turned down multiple opportunities for sanctuary from the Nazis. He refused.
On the day he, the nuns, and hundreds of children were ordered to the train, they dressed in their best clothes and carried their favorite toys and books. Korczek led them down the street in rows of four, they boarded the train, and were never seen again.
Janusz Korczak and children in his orphanage pose for a photo in the 1920s. Source: Wikipedia.
This is not easy.
I’m in a room discussing deportation. I want to leave. There are sounds of trains, movies of locomotives and dread-painted faces. I want to leave, to sit, to be comforted. Yet I owe it to these people to hear their stories.
Another woman had a chance to escape, but she stayed in Poland for her mother. She was murdered in 1943.
I have to go to the bathroom, but there were no bathrooms on the cattle cars heading to Auschwitz.
Zaleman Gradowski was forced to aid Nazi soldiers at the death camp he had been committed to. He wrote of the sadistic methods of gassing and moving bodies. A note signed by him was found among bodies at Auschwitz.
“Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you, which is, in fact, the practical objective for my writing … that my days of Hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future.”
I want to hug everyone.
Why the Jewish people came to Israel after the liberation makes much more sense now.
I feel utterly destraught for all of those millions of people — the children, teens, young adults, parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents — everyone. They — nor anyone — ever deserves to be tortured in such ways.
Dare I also say I feel a different level of sorrow for those sick, hateful individuals who engineered an industry of twisted death. What hatred — self hatred — they must have felt. Though they appeared to be satisfied with their abhorrently murderous demolition of fellow humans, they must be haunted in their souls. I believe theirs is a lasting trauma as well, though obviously not on the same level or as deeply destructive to their communities or culture.
I can never complain again. My life could never be as bad or lonely as I could imagine, not even in my darkest places.
