Tonight is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, and since I have started a blog, it seems most appropriate to write on this topic.
Twenty years ago today, I was in Poland on the March of the Living. It was an incredible experience, a statement that will be upheld by every past participant. In my own life, this was a life altering experience, for in many ways it set me on the path to Orthodoxy.
Walking through the streets of Warsaw, I remember staring at every silver haired head and thinking, "Where were you? What did you do while my unknown relatives were murdered?" (Thankfully, all of my grandparents were either born in, or had arrived in, America before the Second World War.) I still remember the anger I felt at these living artifacts of nationalism gone terribly wrong. And then the organizers of the March privileged us with meeting a righteous gentile. He told us his story, how he had been taken to the concentration camps for helping Jews, and I was able to hope for the good in the elders we passed.
From that point on, I was better able to dwell on those who died rather than those who murdered them. When I thought about those who died, I began to contemplate what their deaths meant for me. These men, women and children went to their deaths because they were Jews, and they were Jews because, for hundreds of generations, their ancestors had remained faithful to our traditions. I was raised in a family that was not religious. My parents had not been taught about Judaism, but practiced Judaism as their parents before them had...observing the vestiges of a rich heritage diluted in the great "melting pot." But what had all these Jews died for other than that their should still be Jews.
When I returned home, I started eating what I would now call "kosher style." I cared. I wanted to do something to honor those victims. I wanted to thumb my nose at Hitler. And I did.
Twenty years later, I have four beautiful Jewish children who walk around the house singing Jewish songs. (Even my two year old sings Ashrei.)
My eldest child will soon be eight. He has seen, in passing, my photo album from the March of the Living. I have just called him in to ask him if he knows what the Holocaust was, and he told me only that he has heard the word and knows that it is something very bad. When he asked me why, I sent him to bed, telling him that it was, indeed, something very bad and not to be spoken of right before bed.
I try to think back to how I learned about the Holocaust, and, oddly for one who had no direct relatives who survived or perished, it feels like something that I always knew. I do, however, remember when the educational children's program "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" came to town. I remember being deeply moved by it, and understanding, without fully understanding, how tragic it truly was. I can still hear the opening and closing of the title poem, which was written in Terezin by Paval Freedman, a young man who was later killed in Auschwitz ("The last, the very last,/So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow./Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing/against a white stone. . . . Only I never saw another butterfly./That butterfly was the last one./Butterflies don't live in here,/in the ghetto.")
Growing up, I learned a beautiful and haunting version of Ani Maamin... "I believe, with complete faith, in the coming of the messiah." I was taught that this tune had been heart-wrenchingly sung by some Jews as they were led to the gas chamber. It is a song that has always haunted me.
My children believe with a faith far more perfect and complete than mine. When I teach them about the Holocaust, whether I do so tomorrow or in two years time, I know that they will have emuna shelaima, complete faith, that the Holocaust was part of the greater plan God has for our people - a horrible, terrible part of the plan, certainly - but part of the greater whole nevertheless. And every morning, when the 31 little girls in my daughter's class recite this same Ani Maamin (with a far happier tune), we claim our victory over Hitler.
Never again!
No comments:
Post a Comment