Reflections of Life in Shattered Glass: Encountering Public Memory of the Shoah During My Travels in Central Europe (Part 4 of 4)

     I recently watched an American remake of an Israeli film called The Debt (HaChov). I have not seen the Israeli version of the film, so I cannot say whether or not one particularly disturbing scene that appears in the American remake also appears in the Israeli original - though it seems crucial to the back story of one of the main characters, so I am assuming that it plays out similarly in both films. In this scene, the antagonist, Dieter Vogel, is a fertility specialist living in East Berlin in 1966. Mossad agents are dispatched to kidnap him and bring him back to Israel to stand trial for his criminal actions involving medical experiments on women at Auschwitz, where he was known as the “Surgeon of Birkenau.” After he is captured and while he is being held awaiting transport out of Berlin, he confronts one of the Mossad agents with his reasoning for participating in the atrocities at Auschwitz. He asks him, “Why do you think it was so easy to exterminate your people? You’re weakness. I saw it. Every day I saw it. Everyone of them thinking only of how to avoid being flogged or kicked or killed. Everyone thinking only of themselves. Why do you think it only took four soldiers to lead a thousand people to the gas chambers? Because not one out of the thousands had the courage to resist. Not one would sacrifice himself! Not even when we took their children away! So I knew then that you people had no right to live! You had no right….” Expressed in such a way, and by a reviled (if fictional) villain, this bold claim to a justified participation in the atrocities at Auschwitz is, of course, disgusting and deeply disturbing. But, at its heart, it also exposes the thread of thought of many otherwise rational people who look upon the events of the Shoah with similar detachment and judgment. 

     Perhaps, the lesson that (still) needs to be learned is that, short of experiencing the same chaos and trauma without the benefit of foreknowledge about the final outcome, it is a hollow gesture to second-guess the behaviors and responses of those who actually endured the tribulation of the Shoah. Perhaps this helps to understand the huge flow and progression of literature, visual art, and film that focuses on the visceral realism of the Shoah in the eyes of the victims. As well, it helps give context to the emerging religious ritual elements that have begun to engage attendees each year at Yom HaShoah commemorations. Of these, the meditations and liturgies offered in The Six Days of Destruction (Elie Wiesel and Albert Friedlander) and the Megillat Hashoah – Conservative Judaism’s “Scroll of the Holocaust” – represent some of the more promising offerings for reflection and religious intentionality on Yom HaShoah. Both are very successful in bringing the participant into the empathetic space intended by the lawmakers who framed Yom HaShoah against the backdrop of the criticism and judgment of victims that continues to distort (and dishonor, in my opinion) their memory. However, I have connected most profoundly with the Six Days effort.

     The Six Days of Creation is a combination of short tales and liturgies that contrast the Shoah to the Creation account in Bereishit. Inaugurated by the Reform Movement in the mid-1980s, the effort offers Elie Wiesel’s keen insight into the oppressive atmosphere of those times and also the resolve of those enduring it to find moments of peace and connection with each other (and God, when they were able) amidst the despair. Each of the six mediations follows one of the themes of the creation timeline. Perhaps, the best refutation of the sheep-led-to-slaughter criticism is found in the “Fifth Day” section. Here, a group of Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters gather to discuss their plans for the assault on the ghetto guards. Their young leader, twenty-year old Yehuda, is preparing the group for the fight. One of his men has challenged him about their lack of weapons. Yehuda drifts into thought, reflecting on the eternally stacked odds against Jewish warriors. Elie Wiesel opens up Yehuda’s thoughts for us to peer inside: “The resistance movements in occupied Europe all received aid or encouragement – except for the Jews who did not receive help from the Free World. …Why, Lord, did they discriminate against the Jewish fighters? Why were they doomed to oblivion, even contempt? Here and there, warm-hearted men and women of good will had certainly taken up the Jewish cause. Some risked their lives to protect and feed them and to warn them of the dangers that lay ahead. But they were few… few and rare. The Jews simply could not rely on much support from the so-called Aryan world. When a Jew managed to escape from the train that took him to Treblinka or Sobidor, few doors were opened to take him in and bind up his wounds. Sooner or later, he retraced his steps and rejoined the ghetto. It was the only place where people accepted him without mistrust.” 

     Yehuda goes on to recount the efforts of Jews living within the prison of the ghetto to contribute - however possible - to the resistance. Young children, mothers, old men, and capable fighters of both sexes had “…succeeded in holding off tanks, heavily artillery and flame throwers – air force bombers. Day after day, week after week, the blazing ghetto resisted the attack, while outside, in the Aryan districts, people walked about arm in arm and found the spring sunshine pleasant and the spectacle entertaining! …The Jews were alone against the Germans. Alone against those who had denounced them. Alone against neutral, passive, indifferent people. The fighters were alone, and their solitude was that of God. Yet they went on fighting. And forced the enemy to retreat. And showed the whole world that the SS were only mortal; and cowards.” Elie Wiesel reminds us here that aggressive resistance was a reality during the Shoah. Contrary to the opinions of Dieter Vogel and many others who have only seen weakness in Jewish suffering, he reminds us that Jews of every age and station fought for their survival and for their families’ survival while the world turned a deaf ear to their struggle.

     But not all resistance can be measured in gun bursts and guerrilla attacks. Wiesel cautions against grouping everyone together into the same category, because armed resistance was not always a possibility. “Don’t divide them into resistance fighters and weaklings. Even the heroes perished as victims; even the victims were heroes. For it came to pass in those days and in those places that a prayer on the lips was equal to a weapon in the hand. The mother who refused to abandon her children had as much worth as the fighter who led his men into battle. The sage consoled the condemned; the beggar gave his blessing; the teacher taught his disciples how to lead a holy life by risking his own: each resisted the Nazis in a special way.” Yehuda, lost in his zeal to survive, to preserve his dignity at all costs, is finally rebuked by one of his men: “No, Yehuda. It is wrong to claim that fighting is the only source of dignity. The Hasid who looks the murderer straight in the eye dies with dignity. The rabbi who chants his prayers as he goes toward the mass grave and the mystic who wraps himself in his tallit as he walks to Treblinka: do not tell me that they lack dignity.”

     There are many other examples of resistance to the Shoah - aggressive and passive - presented in this short book. The collection is intended to be read individually, within a small group, or during a public commemoration as the situation dictates. Following the meditations, the readers are given the opportunity to participate collectively in a series of liturgies intended to wrap the memories of the individuals represented in the stories into a ritual, and therein, to open up space for participants to find a connection to the cycles of oppression and resistance that have dominated Jewish history. Friedman’s liturgies are also beautiful tributes to the victims and incorporate familiar elements, such as the mourner’s Kaddish and a selection of songs that help tie it to other established Jewish prayers and services. I was very deeply moved by the experience of reading through both the meditations and the liturgies. Though we cannot possibly predict how Yom HaShoah will evolve over the next hundred years or so - as generations are born with no personal connection to the living memory of those who actually experienced the Shoah – I hope that these future Jews will continue to turn to resources developed during the lifetimes of survivors as they reflect on the Shoah, even as they develop their own responses to the great tragedy and try to find ways of integrating it into their own Jewish identity. 

     I am curious about how Jews born during the generations after the deaths of those with direct or second-hand memory of the expulsion from Spain or the destruction of the Second Temple or any of the pogroms digested those events. As children they probably would have heard stories, by then already set into the lyrics of song or woven into a structured recitation, recalling the laments of those who suffered but survived, and of those who struggled but succumbed. I have heard it said that Jews are not historians, but rather storytellers; that is to say, in the Jewish perspective there is a context of meaning and significance - centered on identity and group experience - that is purposely applied to history. Where there has been any event of historical impact, Jews have traditionally attempted to find ways to infuse it with meaning, whether religious, philosophical, or cultural. The Shoah is no different, though the scale and the inexplicable cruelty of the crimes pose an immensely difficult challenge. If it is true that Jews are more collectively subjective in their evaluation of history – storytellers rather than historians -  (and my observations thus far seem to indicate such) then the ongoing story arc of Jewish experience will continue to absorb the Shoah into the framework of liturgy and cultural identity that has for more than twenty-four centuries both preserved what is unique about Jewish civilization and absorbed the assaults of history, transforming them into opportunities to pause, reflect and integrate.

     Yom HaShoah has only just begun the effort of weaving the memory of this enormous tragedy into the immense cloth of Jewish identity. How it evolves, how it is used by future generations to trace their own place in time within the larger ancient thread of Jewish existence and back to this painful trauma might - if we were able to project ourselves into the future to see it - surprise us who live so relatively close to these events. Or, perhaps we would maybe recognize a common theme shared between Yom HaShoah commemorations and how our ancestors transformed their experience of history into something imbued with significance. This is what Jews have done since leaving Egypt. This is part of what makes Jews such a special and enduring force in the larger human story; the resolve to recognize ourselves in relationship not only with those who share our present circumstances, but also with those who persevered for millennia before us - piecing together the stories into the tradition handed down to us - and with those who will follow after us - singing the songs we have composed, reciting our poetic words, and gleaning the wisdom of our sages. After all, were we not originally all together at Sinai - Jews past, present and future sharing in the moment of hearing the revelation and binding ourselves into the covenant, one people and One G-d? 

     We collectively bear the weight of centuries of oppression, but we also join together with the past and future in celebrating our survival and triumph. We continue telling our stories and, through them, introducing hope and healing into the world. Michael Lerner describes it as “…Jews surviving as Jews, with a distinguishable set of Jewish values… continu[ing] to play our role as witnesses to the possibility of healing, repair, and transformation.” The transformation that has occurred within me since my trip to Germany and the Czech Republic occasionally causes me some disorientation. I have only been walking this path for a little less than one year, but already I feel very closely identified with Jewish values and I’m slowly learning to grasp and admire elements of Jewish culture. Certainly, a lifetime isn’t enough time to fully graft onto the vine and I am sure that I will struggle at moments to understand the Jewish world that I am entering. But, having walked in some of the places where contemporary Jewish civilization both flourished and endured one of the greatest threats ever to its very survival, I feel as though I am better prepared to understand some of what gives Jews their strength and resolve. 

     I still feel the fresh and deep psychological and emotional cuts from my visit to some of these sites where the Shoah was first unleashed onto my adopted people. No longer just a sympathetic observer, now I am growing ever more connected to the fortunes and trials of the Jewish people. Ruth’s protest to Naomi’s dismissal in Megillat Ruth echoes very loudly for me now. "Do not entreat me to leave you, to return from following you, for wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. So may the Lord do to me and so may He continue, if anything but death separate me and you." I cannot claim that there have not been moments of doubt that this is the right and true path for me, most noticeably during and immediately following my trip. It is easy to count on the security of life in the United States (even if it is only an illusion), where anti-Semitism, though still alive and occasionally ugly and violent, has never neared the depths of hatred and hostility of its European counterpart. But ever mindful of history, I am conscious of the fact that German Jews prior to the Nazis enjoyed a degree of prosperity that they had never before imagined possible. Yet, so swift and terrible was their decline. Throwing my lot in with the Jewish people – even here in America – still involves great risk. But being counted as a Jew is more meaningful and important to me than ever it was before I was awakened to the severity of the costs. The reason is that I have found in Yom HaShoah (and in every other Jewish observance of remembering our survival through devastating hardships) a determination to continue holding onto each other and to the values that give us purpose. And that purpose is extraordinary and revolutionary: transform the world.

     Lerner cautions us, however, that we should struggle against the gravitational tides that would see our story of hopeful triumph and life-celebration degraded into one of despairing victimhood, fixated on protracted suffering and death. 

Instead of testifying to the existence of God’s energy in the world, there are some powerful forces in the Jewish world that have been recasting Judaism as the religion that testifies to the existence of evil in the world; that sanctifies the notion that it’s a dog-eat-dog world and no one can be trusted; that people should give up utopian hopes and focus more narrowly on their own immediate self-interests; that a narrow realism based on what is must replace an optimism about what could be; that Jews should become a people like all other peoples, with the same morality, the same willingness to sacrifice others for our own advancement, the same willingness to be brutal, and the same determination to get ours without regard to the consequences to others.     

To surrender to this warped interpretation of contemporary Jewish civilization is to dishonor the lives and stories of those who came before us and endured the many hardships, not for the sake of suffering but for the sake of love for Torah and for its transformational influence on the way we experience G-d and each other. But many have retreated from transformational promise of Judaism over the years since the Shoah. Abandoning faith, abandoning cultural identity, abandoning values… many have not been able to escape the shadow of the Shoah and have melted either into cynicism, indifference, or alienation. This is an option for most American and even contemporary European Jews; leaving the community and identity behind is certainly one possible course given the obstacles of living into the promise of Torah. Can we blame them? No, individuals must make these choices for themselves. However, we can and should be mindful to focus our commemorations and public observances on the life affirmations and healing promises of Torah and remaining united with a community that upholds it through the very best of times and the very worst of times rather than allowing them to devolve into a litany of complaints against the evils visited upon Jews over our history. Even the intense mourning atmosphere embodied in the ritual observance of Tisha B’Av is followed by the gradual escalation of the comforting words of Isaiah in Haftarah portions during the remainder of Av and on into Elul. After each point of distress, there is a pause and then a turning back toward the promises of Torah. Should the Shoah require any different response? 

     We have the benefit of knowing the outcome of the Final Solution. While I find it sad that so many have not been able to reconcile their Jewish faith and/or cultural identity with the emotional scarring of the Shoah, I do not desire to second-guess their choices to step back from the community into the relative anonymity of contemporary western life. But after surviving so many successive assaults and unaware of the nascent Nazi threat, we should not be surprised that Jewish culture in Central and Western Europe assimilated when given the opportunity to do so – first in the military and then in commerce and politics. The situation varied, of course, for Jews scattered among the different countries in which they were established. But even in the liberalized atmosphere of early 20^th century Germany, there were many who resisted the calls to engage more fully with German society. Though there are many reasons that Jews did not assimilate into European culture until a very late date (and even then, only in small and scattered numbers and in vastly disparate circumstances), one of the most glaringly obvious reasons was that many just simply did not want to. Whether it was fear of losing their unique identity in the tumult of the modern industrial age, skepticism about their ability to successfully integrate without anti-Semitic reprisals, or anxiety about being rejected by their familiar Jewish social circles, the vast majority were very slow to even acknowledge the possibility, let alone embrace it. Religious Jews and Zionists groups were very quick to condemn assimilationism, for similar reasons despite their differing objectives. Overwhelmingly, assimilationist Jews were viewed as having abandoned and betrayed their Jewish heritage, for which their ancestors had suffered horrible persecutions to maintain. Of course, these distinctions didn’t matter to the Nazis. Religious, Zionist, secular, assimilationist… all were equally targeted for extermination.

     So where are we left? While we do not condemn those who have wandered away from Jewish culture and observance – either through the conscious choice to abandon ship or by the happenstance of inheriting a thoroughly secularized and structurally-assimilated identity – we grapple with how to frame the lingering fallout of the Shoah in such a way as to not fixate on the ruins. What must be emphasized amidst the reading of names and lighting of candles and repetitions of the Kaddish is the survival of the people and the hope for a reclaimed Israel and the healing of the world promised in Torah. Lerner continues:

[Obsessing over the evil inflicted upon us] would be the triumph of Hitler. If the Jewish people no longer testify to the possibility of the transformation of the world; if their existence is no longer based primarily on carrying that message to the world; if Jewish survival becomes a matter of preserving Jewish bodies espousing the values of militarism, national chauvinism, suspicion of others, cleverness in advancing our self-interests über alles, nostalgia for a romanticized past, religion without moral sensitivity, toughness to show that we can’t be pushed around, smartness separated from ethical passion, insistence on our wounds as a way of closing our ears to the pain of others – then Hitler has won.

This is the danger of Holocaust museums and Holocaust fascination. The story must be told. But some who tell it do so in a way that validates pessimism about the possibility of transforming the world. …Instead, using the Holocaust as their warrant, they embrace the cynical logic of self-interest that is the common sense of the contemporary society. In so doing, they merely return us to the same alienated and cynical individualism, which eventually creates a hunger for community so desperate that people are willing to embrace the very totalitarian or fascistic forms of community from which this liberal individualism was designed to protect us.

No doubt, Lerner’s words are bold and controversial. It seems at first like sacrilege to inject criticism of any kind into a discussion about the Shoah. But I don’t think that his words lack sensitivity or reverence for the memory of the victims, even if they are harsh. In fact, I think that these sentiments best embody the hope intended in the original framing of the Knesset’s Yom HaShoah proclamation: that the victims be remembered for their strengths rather than a misperception of their weaknesses; that numbers be replaced with human faces; that we pause to reflect on our continued survival despite the appearance of Amalek in every generation. When, in Six Days of Destruction, the boldest of Yehuda’s young fighters challenges his argument that fighting is their only means of maintaining a shred of dignity, he does not stop with defending those who only prayed because they had no strength to fight. He linked the fate of those with whom he shared the ghetto bunker to every Jew who ever suffered or died for the sake of being a Jew, of holding onto the promise. “It is eternity which gives significance to this moment. It is history which gives this moment its profound quality, which gives it richness as well as unhappiness. I choose to fight because I think of Abraham and Moses, of Rabbi Akiva and the Besht, of the scholars and their disciples throughout the centuries! For them? Yes. But not only for them. With them. It is with them as well that we shall go into battle….”

     I may never be called into battle to defend myself or my Jewish sisters and brothers from the threat of destruction. Conversely, history’s wheel might once again turn and try to crush us beneath it, in which case our resolve and strength will be tested. But living into the promise of a Torah-based life - staying true to the vision of healing that it offers to me, my relationships, my people, humanity, and all of creation - is the reason for remembering the sacrifices of those who have come before us and left us with the immense wisdom and beauty of Judaism that we are now privileged to carry forward. It is a task worthy of a Moses or an Akiva, yet it is presented to me. How will I help to carry forward the legacy of the Jewish people? How will I carry Torah into the world beyond my home and workplace? I don’t have the answers to those questions yet except in one regard: It is with the giants of the past that I shall go into battle. It is through memory that we understand the present and shine light on the future. It is through commemoration of the events that define and preserve our unique identity that we connect with the current of strength that has flowed out of Sinai to our contemporary situation. My trek through Germany and Prague will always remind me of where I first started to understand the high cost of being Jewish. But the cost is rewarded by a rich tradition and a promise of healing that has survived the worst of human evils and continues to thrive.

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Reflections of Life in Shattered Glass: Encountering Public Memory of the Shoah During My Travels in Central Europe (Part 3 of 4)

       While the historical record reveals a generally strained and frequently tortured existence for Jews living within the larger German and Bohemian cultures for well over a thousand years, it is commonly acknowledged that the interim between the career of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) and the rise of the Nazis was a period of relative tolerance and prosperity for the Jews of Northern and Central Europe. Of course, the pendulum of social equality continued to swing both for and against Jews during this time; anti-Semitism rising predictably when fueled by periodic financial crises and growing nationalist tides. But with the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919, Jewish political and commercial interests were elevated to heights previously imagined to be beyond reach. More than in any other European society, Jews in Germany had integrated and formed political and national sympathies to a degree that offered them liberation from their historical lot as permanent aliens in the regions they had inhabited for centuries. This contrasted sharply with the status of Jews in most of the rest of Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe (Poland, for example, was the more typical experience). Anti-Semitism was a constant and unfaltering fact-of-life to be sure, but opportunities for assimilation - both economic and social - were available if Jews chose to embrace them; and many did. 

       In hindsight, we cannot argue that these pre-WW2 years were the best of times for world Jewry, especially in comparison to the trend of positive strides made in North America since 1945 and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1949. But relative to both their own history in the territories of proto-Germany as well as the continuing plight of Jews in neighboring states of Eastern Europe, German Jews had entered a notably prosperous era. However, it was to be short-lived. The conditions of the Versailles Treaty would doom the young Weimar Republic and with it, all of the improvements in Jewish status. The illusion of security collapsed around them and in the space of less than three years German Jews ceased being German in the eyes of society and were once again reduced to a humiliating status of Ausländer (foreigner), this time under the auspices of the Nürnberg Laws. The seeds of the Shoah had already begun to sprout in this early period of Nazi growth in the German political system.

          The calls coming from Jews championing the assimilationist cause - even going so far as to encourage the renunciation of Jewish identity in the name of nationalist fervor - was of course rooted in a deluded, if idealistic, confidence in the ability of a liberalized German society to resist the deeply-ingrained historical pattern of descending into mob panic when faced with economic and political uncertainty, casting all blame for their woes on their resident whipping boys, the Jews. Incredibly, Boris Pasternak continued to preach the very same promises of Jewish assimilationist ideals even after the devastation of the Shoah (!) and Stalin’s brutal Gulag imprisonment of repatriated Russian Jews, summing up the argument in Dr. Zhivago as a challenge to those who fell under the Nazis and Soviets. “In whose interests is this voluntary martyrdom?” he asks. Later, he begs “Dismiss this army which is forever fighting and being massacred, nobody knows for what?  …Say to them: ‘That’s enough. Stop now. Don’t hold on to your identity. Don’t all get together in a crowd. Disperse. Be with all the rest.’”

         It is unsettling to read Pasternak’s condemnation of a people so terribly brutalized as the result of zealous political ideology. And it is beyond difficult to know what to make of such an argument. Undefeated by the furious retort of the Shoah and the Soviet terrors, Pasternak seems here to blame the victims for their own hardships and murders! “If you’d only abandoned your Jewishness,” he implies, “…if you had joined the Nazi assault on Europe then maybe you’d have survived.” Never mind their total exclusion from such an option. How he was able to reconcile this strange logic with the total disenfranchisement of all Jews almost immediately following the rise of the Nazis to political dominance is baffling considering that observant, secular, non-self-identified, descendants of converts from Christianity, descendants of converts to Christianity, atheists … ALL categories of people with any traceable link to Jewish heritage were targeted by the Nazis. So, while initially assimilation held the promise of liberation for those who sang its praises, the promise went unfulfilled and their songs fell on deaf SS ears as they were herded along with every other Jew into walled ghettoes, prison camps, and eventually train cars bound for Poland. The Final Solution contained no opt-out clause for Jews, even assimilated ones.     

     Recognizing the ceaseless threats to the existence of Jews around the world several decades before the rise of the Third Reich, the various players behind the development of the different threads of Zionism understood that without a geographic state established in the historical homeland of Eretz Israel, Jews would forever remain at the mercy of their persecutors. So, the establishment of the contemporary state of Israel represents a source of collective relief for Jews around the world – both those resident in the land and the millions living outside of its borders. The promise of a secure homeland to shelter Klal Israel against the seemingly irrepressible tides of hostility that rise in every generation offers hope to a people who suffered exile for nearly 1,800 years. But since the earliest moments following Independence, Israel has faced near-constant threats from its neighbors until once again the future of the Jewish homeland – and by extension, the security of the Jewish people - looks anything but guaranteed. So, it seems quite understandable that a large amount of political will and energy be dedicated to maintaining the concept of what is at stake for Jews forced to live without the backing of a geographically anchored Jewish state by carrying the banner of Shoah memory forward into generations beyond the days remaining for our last living witness to those times.

          With the future security of the Jewish people invested in both preserving the memory of the past in the form of Shoah memorialization and commemoration and guaranteeing the future in the form of a viable, defendable Eretz Israel, the methods of one are dependent upon the other. That is, keeping alive the memory of the Shoah helps to reinforce the necessity and political justification of the state of Israel. Perhaps this was one of the considerations that led Knesset members to authorize Yom HaShoah in April, 1951, though other rationales abound. Certainly, law makers were not bound to the creation of a special day to honor the victims of this Jewish tragedy and many Orthodox rabbis have never solemnified the date, preferring instead to remember it with other losses observed together on Tisha B’Av or the Tenth of Tevet. In particular, the timing of Yom HaShoah raises conflicts owing to its appearance in the month of Nisan when fasting and certain mourning observances are restricted (Nisan, of course, is the month in which Pesach is observed and expectations of joyful celebration set the tone for daily rhythms). The Orthodox position seems justifiable and even preferable considering this context alone.

        So, understanding the possibility of conflict that might (and did) arise between Orthodox and other observant denominations and secular Jews, why did the Knesset ignore the Chief Rabbinate’s 1949 designation of the 10^th of Tevet as the preferred date for Shoah remembrance? The date chosen as well as the full name of the commemoration – Yom HaShoah V’Hagevurah, “Day of Remembrance of the Shoah and the Heroism” - yield a significant clue. According to various sources compiled and summarized in the Yom HaShoah guide of the publication Conservative Judaism, the Shoah education programs in Israel in the early 1950s were characterized overwhelmingly by a high emphasis on the suffering of European Jews. This evidently bypassed the sympathies of young Israelis who simply deduced (though incorrectly) from the scale of the Shoah that European Jews must have remained docile in the face of the threat and were easily led to their slaughter. 

       I should pause here to admit that before taking on this project one of the biggest obstacles with which I wrestled during my visit to Europe and at the start of my research on this topic was paving over my preconception of Jewish resistance to the Shoah as minimal or non-existent. But what I have learned since beginning this exercise (one that I hope to continue) is that examples of resistance – both aggressive and passive – abound in the documentation and oral histories of the countless acts that comprise what we call now the Shoah. Though our ideas about what resistance should look like come in many forms, we often overlook the more subtle but hugely significant instances when it occurred. When people chose dignity even when that meant losing their lives and when others shared ridiculously meager rations at the cost of their own remaining shreds of health, they were resisting. Of course, the “Heroes” mentioned in the full title of the commemoration are linked to one of the better known examples of aggressive resistance: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19 April 1943 (14^th of Nisan). The largest single instance of revolt by Jews against the Nazis during the Shoah, the Uprising was intended to thwart Germany’s transference of the remainder of the Warsaw Ghetto population to the extermination camp at Treblinka, Poland. 

         Since the beginning of the concentration of the Warsaw region’s 400,000 Jews into the ghetto in 1940, many thousands had died from starvation and disease. In just a three month period during the summer of 1942, nearly 300,000 of those who had survived the horrible conditions of the ghetto during the previous year and half were transported to Treblinka and murdered. By the end of that same year word was passed to the remaining ghetto residents that the Nazi “relocation program” was a rouse and that their family members and friends had ended up in the extermination camps rather than in forced labor details as was previously believed. So, in early 1943 a group of 400+ insurgents armed with smuggled handguns, primitive hand-crafted weapons, and very little ammunition began to organize a resistance formed of two units: the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB (Jewish Combat Organization) and the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW (Jewish Military League). On January 18^th when the Nazis initiated the second mass transport of residents to Treblinka, ZOB fighters who had sneaked into the lines of deportees responded to a signal and opened fire on Nazi guards. Most of the other deportees were able to slip away during the fighting so the second wave was limited to a relatively small transport of 6,000 residents. Deportations resumed for another four days but were limited due to further strikes from the ZOB. The resistance grew to nearly 1,000 during the following three months.

          On 19 April 1943 - Erev Pesach - the Nazis began their final wave of deportations. The 30,000 remaining residents remained hidden so that when the guards entered the ghetto the resistance was able to launch a guerrilla assault from windows in the empty apartment blocks. Though they had been surprised by the attack, the Nazis recovered and responded by burning the apartment buildings and consequently trapping or flushing out the resistance fighters. By the middle of May the deportation officials declared a victory with the expulsion of all but a tiny number of residents who had somehow managed to remain hidden, and marked the occasion by demolishing the Great Synagogue. The SS commander who oversaw the action, SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, remembered supervising its destruction: “What a wonderful sight! I called out Heil Hitler! and pressed the button. A terrific explosion brought flames right up to the clouds. The colors were unbelievable. An unforgettable allegory of the triumph over Jewry. The Warsaw Ghetto has ceased to exist.” Stroop reported to his bosses that 180 resistance fighters – “bandits and subhumans” - had been killed during the final day of armed confrontation. Altogether, the Nazis recorded the deaths of more than 13,000 Jews during the length of the resistance –nearly 6,000 of those had died in the apartment block blazes set by the guards. Nearly all of the surviving residents were finally captured and deported to Treblinka where, in most cases, they were murdered shortly after arrival. 

    

          Though official counts of German casualties are difficult to accurately pin-down due to Nazi propaganda policy forbidding the release of any but reduced numbers of wounded, Marek Edelman, one of the few Uprising leaders to survive the Shoah, estimated that upwards of 300 German casualties resulted from the resistance guerrilla assault. Of course, the efforts of the resistance fighters in the Uprising were the driving force behind the Knesset’s decision to honor their sacrifices with the settling of the Yom HaShoah near the anniversary date of the launching of the main resistance assault. Ultimately, the decision to push the commemorations to a date 13 days after the Uprising anniversary was a practical concession to the complications that would have resulted from layering Yom HaShoah on top of the eve of Pesach. So, the 27^th of Nisan is now the official date established for Yom HaShoah. This also serves to locate it just eight days before the twin public holidays of Yom Hazicharon and Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Israeli Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day and Israeli Independence Day respectively), thus forming the Yom Trifecta of public observances in Israel weaving together the themes of Jewish collective identity over the millennia: hardship, perseverance, and triumph.

          Official observances in Israel include the sounding of sirens at sundown and at 11am on 27 Nisan. Traffic is halted and pedestrians come to attention for the duration of the two-minute siren blast. Television and radio programming is focused on the Jewish experiences of the war and all public entertainment venues are closed. A state ceremony is conducted at Warsaw Ghetto Plaza at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem where the flag is lowered to half-mast, and candles are lit to honor the memory of those who died.

        Yom HaShoah observances outside of Israel are generally more religious affairs. Diaspora Jews typically gather at synagogues or community centers. Vigils and educational programs are offered to the community and recitations of Psalms and poems and performances of musical pieces oftentimes are accompanied by talks from survivors. In some cases lists of names of those who died are read in public spaces. My first participation in a Yom HaShoah service occurred within three weeks of my return from Europe, so my reflections on what I experienced during my visit to the many memorials, museums, historical sites linked to the former Jewish communities and to the Shoah and to Dachau were still very raw. Yom HaShoah of 2011 proved to be both a healing and provocative experience. I say provocative because I left with more questions than I brought with me to the service. The speakers were two sisters who had survived the betrayals of their native Czechoslovakian society, relocation through several camps, and ultimately one of the many death marches before being liberated by the advancing American Army. It was a beautiful experience to listen to them re-live those times and to speak of how they have managed to reengage with life ever since. But, I was very troubled by the helplessness of their situation and of the other millions who were marched to death or forced to submit to medical experiments or be pulled away from a loved one and pushed into an underground death chamber. 

         Like the Israeli school children of the 1950s, I hadn’t been exposed to the examples where Jews had fought back and preserved their human dignity even if they ultimately didn’t survive the effort. I felt outraged that old men and little babies, and wives, and sons, and mothers were allowed to be destroyed without defiance. Of course, this is a problematic and horribly unfair position to take. But I was not alone in thinking that Jews allowed themselves to be slaughtered without resistance. I didn’t ever think that it was weakness of character that allowed this perception of their situation to develop, but I am guilty of having thought that perhaps there was some kind of quality of faith, an insistence on trusting in divine providence to see them delivered, or perhaps a stubborn resistance to recognize the reality of the threat at its earlier stages. Now I am ashamed that I ever held onto those thoughts. How easy it is for an American raised as a Christian to sit in the comfort of his security in society and play Monday morning quarterback to a scenario so bleak that it pushes the limits of believability to look closely at the details of how events developed. Certainly, my former opinions on the matter aren’t without their supporters in both popular opinion and even in scholarship. What is most shocking to me now, however, is to see that this same denial of Jewish strength and outrage echoes even within various Diaspora Jewish and Israeli circles as well. To some degree, it seems that the dilemma of combating the image of the weak Jew faced by Israeli educators in the 50s has persisted and still influences the conversation.

Reflections of Life in Shattered Glass: Encountering Public Memory of the Shoah During My Travels in Central Europe (Part 2 of 4)

               If there is a lesson to be learned from the Shoah, it is hard to find it among the ashes of the dead and the scars of the survivors. The utter horror of their destruction should not, in my belief, be disrespected with an attempt to dispel the chaos of those years with a list of rational explanations. “The world was consumed by madness” is a pathetic excuse. “We were just following orders” is not worth any response but raw incredulity. The horrifying truth is that reason was given over to evil inhibition and the chaos of orgiastic selfishness was allowed to run amok. So, rather than attempt to sloganize or find meaning in the destruction of the thousand year old Yiddish civilization, it seems to me that memorialization of the tragedy is perhaps best expressed in terms of reinforcing the human identity and personal stories of Shoah victims and, in so doing, aim to suppress the tendency of history to reduce them to mere statistical footnotes. Removing the sting of looking at those years as a repeatable future scenario for humanity should continually be resisted. Given human propensity for burying our painful memories under indifference, we must challenge ourselves continually to look evil in the face so we don’t forget its appearance and allow it to be welcomed among us again in later days. 

          That the federal and state governments of Germany have enacted laws for the express purpose of remembering the Nazi atrocities - forbidding public denial of the Shoah, banning displays of Nazi symbols, ensuring cooperation with ongoing attempts to recover and return stolen property, and engaging in public discourse through the formal education system – demonstrates a commitment (on the part of the state) to prevent the recurrence of variations of the nightmare in future scenarios among the German populace. Of course, the ubiquitous Never Again slogan appears etched in marble at nearly every major memorial, is printed in most informational pamphlets, and is repeated by every tour guide leading high school groups, foreign travelers, and descendants of survivors through the former camps. I wondered on more than one occasion during my own visit to Dachau and walking through the many impressive public moments like the vast Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe what survivors must think upon seeing these words emblazoned upon the sites of their former tribulations. My own thoughts were very mixed then, and to some extent they still aren’t resolved to understanding the contradiction in proclaiming something we’ve never come close to achieving as if it were somehow a historical relic. I understand the cautionary warning resonant in the sentiment, but I left those horrible places feeling that it might have been more meaningful to simply acknowledge that it should never have been allowed to happen at all and that the hatred never really ever stopped; it just became momentarily dispersed, displaced to the underground fora of unfashionable nationalisms and zealous extremisms, morphing into unspoken promises of a future (maybe even present-day?) return.  

          Before we ever left the hotel to walk the beautiful morning-lit streets of Munich to meet the train to Dachau, I was dreading the trip. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to visit the memorial to learn more about the history of the place, but rather I didn’t know what to expect from the emotional impact of the experience. Our experiences in Berlin had already transformed our carefree vacation into a very serious trek through history. I had been warned by some not to spend my vacation time in such places. But, I was told by others that it was an absolute necessity that I visit at least one of the camps during our trip. At various points in our travels we were very near to the sites of the former Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt, and Dachau concentration camps. Deciding on Dachau was primarily the result of some heavy convincing on the part of a Munich tour guide we’d hired the previous afternoon. 

       Originally, we’d hoped to devote the day to an excursion out to Füssen to see King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein Castle. We tossed the decision back and forth until finally deciding that we’d join the tour out to KZ Dachau memorial instead. I knew from what I’d read ahead of time that none of the extermination camps were located within the present-day borders of Germany proper; those were all in rural Poland. Instead, Dachau served as a concentration facility intended primarily for political dissidents and Soviet prisoners of war; though at various stages its inmate population swelled with evicted Jews (mainly from Munich following the Novemberpogrome),  Jehovah’s Witnesses, and suspected or accused homosexuals. What contributed most to Dachau’s sour reputation, however, was the dreaded combination of it having been both the very first such camp to be opened under the Nazi regime (operating until to the very end of the war) and also serving as the headquarters of the Schutzstaffel Totenkopfverbände (SS) Death’s Head Unit camp guard training school (Übungslager) where guards and supervisors for every other camp – including the extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka – were educated in the sadistic methods of torture that claimed the lives of so many of the victims not sent directly to the gas chambers. It was a tragically miserable place during its twelve years of operation under the Reich (1933-1945) and it continues to project a very disturbing atmosphere. 

         Yes, the shade of sadness still lingers there even now as one walks the twisting hallways of the intake building where preserved reminders of SS cruelty remain as testaments to the suffering of the inmates. The SS seemed to especially revel in ironic twists of sadism. The large painted signs reading Rauchen verboten – “Smoking Prohibited” – that were posted in the inmate receiving rooms reminded new prisoners of the simple human pleasures they were being forced to leave behind. The guards thought the signs were funny since prisoners would never be allowed to possess cigarettes at Dachau. The large space running from the muster grounds where prisoners faced summary executions back through the lot that once held the 69 inmate barracks is now left vacant like a gaping wound on the earth. A rebuilt row of barrack houses intended to give the memorial visitor an idea of their cramped dimensions (1600 inmates housed in buildings with no more than 250 bunks each) is all that remains in this section of the camp. Sandwiched between the replicas and the post-liberation shrines and chapels at the far end of the field, with the original guard towers still perched along the perimeters, only the barracks’ foundation blocks indicate where over 32,000 prisoners were crammed into facilities designed for a maximum of 5,000. 

  

      It is believed that far more than 200,000 prisoners were processed and held at KZ Dachau during its twelve year run under the SS, though an exact figure will probably never be known.  Of those, nearly 1/3 were Jews who were either murdered in-camp through torture, shooting, starvation, over-work, disease, or medical experimentation or sent on to the horrors of the extermination camps in Poland. As we walked through this place, it was difficult to fully grasp the reality of the terror unleashed there seventy years earlier, to comprehend that we were standing in the very same locations where the severest cruelties imaginable were once inflicted on the inmates. Everywhere were pictures documenting the crimes, but even standing in the same spots as the victims in these photographs I found it too overwhelming to really open up to the stark history. What I felt was a strange light-headedness and a mixture between nausea, anger, and overwhelming sorrow. I didn’t focus too much on looking at the personal items stolen from the victims as they went through intake processing (torture) and I didn’t allow myself to linger very long in the bunker where prisoners were interrogated and murdered or in the crematorium where their bodies were piled up until they could be incinerated in the ovens. I was afraid to allow my mind to wander too much, afraid I might break down.

      Contrasting sharply with the ghastly scene of the camp was the beautiful scenery surrounding the perimeter fence. Tall spring-leafed trees lined the barbed-wire borders and large lawns of green grass stretched alongside the trenches between the prisoner barracks and the guard towers. And overhead, the entire scene was blanketed by an endless beautiful sapphire blue sky. The contradiction between the natural environment and the camp was alarming and unsettling. I had expected rain and black clouds, not piercing sunlight and crystal skies. The natural beauty of Bavaria only adds to the disjointed feeling one can experience in such a place. I felt emotionally blindsided by the surreal juxtaposition. How many beautiful days had mocked the prisoners once locked within those barbed wire fences? As I have read and digested Simon Wiesenthal’s book, The Sunflower, over the past few months since returning from this trip, I have not been able to move beyond his descriptions of the vibrantly-colored flowers growing atop the graves in a German soldiers’ cemetery that he saw during marches to forced labor sites in the area surrounding the Lemberg concentration camp in present-day Ukraine. Certain that he wouldn’t survive the raging onslaught, he laments that he would probably end up in an unmarked mass grave devoid of any beauty like that bestowed on the graves of the Germans. This is how KZ Dachau seemed to me: a vast tomb, a scarred and barren wasteland surrounded by beauty and vibrance lavished on the other side of the walls.

 

      Our tour guide was the first to ask us to consider the paradox of proclaiming “Never Again” at Shoah memorials considering that the world has witnessed a near-constant continuation of genocidal programs since the end of World War 2. She asked us to think about what rights we have to make such a bold claim in the shadow of continuing slaughter of entire populations around the globe. I admit that at first this seemed like an irreverent reaction to the intentions of the slogan. But then I began looking at it with a question mark pasted to the end: “Never Again?” Of course, we all desire an end to targeted exterminationist terror. Wasn’t the very fact that most of us had opted to spend a day wandering around Dachau instead of the fairytale castle Neuschwanstein evidence enough of our commitment to educating ourselves about the Shoah and remembering the lives lost during those years? But I realize now that had I left that place feeling like I had paid my share of tribute to their memory and not been so effected that it would continue to haunt me in the hours, weeks, months, and even years beyond my return, the Never Again slogan could be marked a failure. That I remain eviscerated by the memories of what I saw and felt at the memorials and am left with question after question after question… that I have a compelling need to process this history through some manner of personalized liturgy or ritual is indication to me that the provocation resonant in the slogan has succeeded in sealing the metamorphosis that began in me when I walked through those iron gates.

      I was never on course to forgetting or treating lightly the events of the Shoah; it has always deeply impacted me. But physical proximity to the events - though separated by nearly 70 years (the span of a human lifetime) - gorged a chasm between the person I was before the trip and who I am becoming at this stage in my journey. I don’t pretend to believe that all have been affected in this way or, alternatively, that I have experienced anything unique. Though many of the school children seemed bored by the tours (Bavarian high school students are required to visit at least two concentration camp sites before graduating so, for many, this probably wasn’t a first experience with Nazi atrocities), I remain impressed that Germany has returned to and continued the action of the Allied forces upon liberating the camps, forcing locals to witness the consequences of support for the Nazi regime. Perhaps the blank stares of the students were just the mask that adolescents around the world wear in such circumstances. I cannot help but believe that their visit at the very least puts a few human faces on the victims.         

        Public displays of Shoah guilt – the continuing collective self-flagellation of Germany (and to a lesser extent, the other countries complicit with the Nazi agenda) – serve an effective, if controversial, set of purposes: villains of the Third Reich are not permitted (in decent company, at least) to be re-imagined as heroes; the roles of central European Jewry (primarily) in the historical and cultural development of the nations where it took root is not allowed to be denied or simply forgotten (though this continues to be a struggle in many locations); the patterns and methods of genocide are dissected and displayed for public inspection, revealing the insidious seeds that anchor themselves in nationalist rhetoric and political propaganda; and, most importantly, many of the names (though sadly not all) of the very real, flesh-and-blood human beings who suffered such unspeakable horrors and died tragic deaths are engraved in stone and whispered by the millions of visitors who approach and linger over the Never Again placards (typically placed only yards away from wrought-iron entry gate lintels proclaiming the sarcastically cruel Nazi slogan Arbeit Macht Frei – “Work Makes You Free”). 

 

      Never Again…. Of course, the question is “why was it allowed to happen in the first place?” And, if it happened once, what will keep it from happening again? What gives us the right to say “Never again” when the mass graves of Serbia, Rwanda, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cambodia, and Darfur cover over the unidentified remains of individuals deemed unworthy to live because of their religion, ethnic heritage, political affiliation, or “social value?” These questions have plagued me since returning from my trip before diving directly into Pesach where I celebrated the liberation of the Jewish people from bondage and suffering in Egypt. It has seemed to me at times that the Jewish people have simply been passed between the crushing hammer blows of one terrible empire to the next - Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Syria, Rome, Spain, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia – and between these pogroms, expulsions, and exterminations, Jews have been given but the briefest of moments to compose and compile some of the most beautiful masterworks of literature, philosophy, legal theory, folklore, music, art, and liturgical expression ever crafted by human minds. For such magnificent creations and for the souls of the people who created them, it is worth remembering and commemorating the Shoah – both celebrating the triumph of those who survived and mourning the losses of the women, men, and children (more than 1 million!) that preserved and cultivated a renewal of this heritage in their own lives before falling under the Nazi hammer. But the objectives of memorializing are not always clear. What is remembered? Who is honored? What – if any – lessons are to be learned and taught to the next generation? These are difficult questions with no clear or easy answers. 

        What is abundantly clear, however, is that remembrance for its own sake – keeping alive, honoring and celebrating the memory of that which has been lost – is a deeply ingrained value of Jewish identity and observance, and has been ever since the early days of Israelite origins as preserved in Torah and in the legendary mists of tradition. It is blatantly evident to an outside observer that Jewish identity swings like a pendulum between collective memories of triumph and disaster. Each festival, nearly every liturgical expression, the ancient origin traditions, the prophetic utterances, the many collected writings, interpretations and folklore always keep an eye on the past in hope for a return to the protective embrace of the G-d of Israel. So, for individuals choosing a life of Judaism, stepping into this dance of the eternal ebb and flow between past, present, and future appears to be one of the master keys to unlocking the experience of identifying with Klal Israel. It is, in a way, through do-ing that we are enabled to grasp be-ing, belonging to a group united in common understanding. We will do and we will hear.

 

           In this sense, our relatively close historical proximity to the occurrence of the Shoah (as opposed to an older event like the Cossack pogrom of 1919 of which there are no longer any living survivors, all the way back to the very ancient destruction of the second temple and earlier) opens up doorways for those of us weaving our personal threads into the ancient tapestry of Jewish identity. Embracing opportunities to learn first-hand from survivors and walking side-by-side with contemporary Jewish communities as they all continue to wrestle with the fallout of the Shoah through their own constructions of a re-imagined, post-European Judaism are opportunities for us to share in the revitalization of the people as a whole. This might sound at first like a grand abstraction or even a presumption, but the reality is that the many diverse groupings in the Jewish world are still grappling with the fresh wounds of the Shoah even now. The fact that so many survivors continue to reach out to connect with later generations of Jews to tell their own versions of the experience adds layers of reflection and insight onto the ever-growing archive of documentation. Their memories are tempered now by a separation in time of nearly seven decades. When they open up to us, with the wisdom gleaned from having moved from survivor to sage, they refine earlier interpretations of this history and help us to re-sculpt our own encounters with the Shoah. That these survivor-sages often play central roles in Yom HaShoah observances is of immeasurable value to those of us who are living in times when we are able to gather without restriction, without socially- or politically-sanctioned persecution, to hear and absorb memories from living witnesses to times when such was not the case.  

Reflections of Life in Shattered Glass: Encountering Public Memory of the Shoah During My Travels in Central Europe (Part 1 of 4)

"It is eternity which gives significance to this moment. It is history which gives this moment its profound quality, which gives it richness as well as unhappiness. I choose to fight because I think of Abraham and Moses, of Rabbi Akiva and the Besht, of the scholars and their disciples throughout the centuries! For them? Yes. But not only for them. With them. It is with them as well that we shall go into battle….”

Elie Wiesel, from The Six Days of Destruction

     

     When my partner and I booked our flights to Germany and the Czech Republic last year, we had imagined the trip as just a causal getaway. What we’d heard from friends about Berlin’s club scene and Prague’s river views was enough for us to schedule the vacation time and book the flights. But our plans were upended after I committed to choosing Judaism. Nightlife and courtyard cafes began to slowly slide down the ranks of our sightseeing list once we fully grasped the fact that we were headed into the geographic heart of one of history’s darkest periods. This beautiful, fairytale-like region had witnessed the rise of a savagery that once threatened to exterminate the people I now hoped to call my own. Though the Shoah occurred many decades before my time, it still echoes very loudly down the corridors of collective memory. I needed for our trip to include encounters with the lingering shadow of that nightmare. Though I didn’t recognize it until very recently, I needed to test my resolve to the commitment I was making by identifying as a Jew. Their history – the great triumphs and the crushing defeats - would soon be my own, and their future (my future) means understanding the consequences of such a commitment.

     We managed to squeeze a lot of variety into our itinerary. But while we certainly walked through our fair share of museum exhibits and sampled plenty of the regional beers, what really continues to hammer at my memories of this trip are the many moments when we were confronted with the ruins of Jewish civilization scattered about the reconstructed cityscapes. Cropping up in quite unexpected places – astride a train platform or tucked away into a narrow alley – these markers betray the efforts of urban planners to cover over the desolation ignited by the Nazis with re-imagined street grids and achingly beautiful public spaces. The darkness of the Third Reich still stains the atmosphere where the events we call the Shoah – the Catastrophe - were set into motion. I found it impossible to ignore this grim reality even when surrounded by the medieval-ultramodern pastiches that are today’s Germany and Czech Bohemia.

     Much to their credit, Germany withstood the pressure of movements in the 1950s and 60s that desperately yearned for the postwar society to just bury the humiliations of the Nazi past in the archives. Due to the sustained perseverance and courage of victims primarily, open discussion and education about the Shoah eventually won out over efforts to allow the horrors of the past to dwindle into faded memory. But, independent cities and regions have dealt differently with the subject of German guilt for both the destructiveness of the war and the Reich’s crimes against its many targeted victims. Alongside the scattered site-marker memorials in Berlin, huge segments of prime city-center real estate have been built into massive public monuments and educational centers, very loudly declaring (and  decrying) collective German guilt for the war and the Shoah. Even the names of some of these monuments - like the enormous Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe - do not flinch from the dreadful in-your-face reminders of this bitter chapter in German history. While not as front-and-center as Berlin’s memorials, Nürnberg has preserved sections of the massive Nazi Party rally grounds and established the Documentation Center, a museum dedicated to exploring the “…causes, the context and the consequences of the National Socialist reign of terror.” And, of course, throughout Germany, several former concentration camps like the notorious KZ Dachau outside of Munich have been converted into memorial sites.

 

         Owing to the sensitivity and unavoidable controversy attached to any Shoah memorial, other cities and regions have approached the commemoration efforts differently. In Munich, Hitler’s so-called Hauptstadt der Bewegung (“Capital of the Movement”), subtle, easy-to-miss placards and inlays scattered throughout the old city (which, unlike Berlin, was painstakingly restored to its original pre-war condition) have an altogether different effect on those who are observant enough to notice them. Supposedly, they are intended to provoke the observer to ask questions about the significance of their respective locations, though admittedly I have struggled with recognizing the effectiveness of such a muted response. Indeed, it is apparent that Munich has allowed the KZ Dachau site to carry most of the burden for memorializing those who were terrorized by the Nazi’s, though Munich was home to the party’s initial successes and launched it onto the national political scene. Bavaria in general and Munich in particular bear a significant share of historical responsibility for the party’s rise. It annually hosted Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch anniversary celebrations. It was during one of these citywide galas (9 November 1938) that he authorized the Novemberpogrome against Jewish communities across Germany (romanticized as Kristallnacht by Reich propagandists). Hitler’s vision of a Munich cleansed of Jews was nearly realized as the city’s 12,000 Jews were rapidly reduced to less than 100 following the pogrom. Many of them eventually died in Dachau and its sub-camps, and later in the extermination camps in Poland.     

     Outside of Germany, countless other memorial tributes  to the devastated Jewish populations of the countries occupied by the Nazis are maintained by both public trusts and private foundations (some are more successful than others at educating and laying blame and/or accepting their share of responsibility for surrendering to the Nazis their own “undesirables”). A striking example that we visited following our stay in Munich is the beautifully preserved  Jewish Museum in Prague - a collection of former and active synagogues, ceremonial halls, and a cemetery, all of which once served as the nexus of daily life in the old Josefov Jewish Quarter. The Nazis themselves established the Central Jewish Museum in 1942 to preserve cultural and religious items seized from destroyed Jewish communities throughout Bohemia and Moravia with the intention of ultimately offering a public exhibit to be called the Museum of an Extinct Race – a type of sadistic triumphal monument glorifying their destruction of Jewish civilization in Europe. Upon the defeat of the Third Reich however, the Josefov buildings were returned to the remnants of Prague’s Jewish community which was left to tend to the massive collection of items that had been looted from their now-demolished former homes.

 

     The architectural styles of the Josefov synagogues and the eminence of the many medieval Jewish luminaries buried in the old cemetery are still very impressive. However, I grew unbearably sad as I began to realize that the crowds packed into these remnants of these once-thriving synagogue communities were mainly just curious gawkers, come to parade through the spectacle of the Jewish community’s ruins before rushing off to the Starbucks at Wenceslas Square. At least 61,000 of Prague’s Jews (nearly two thirds of its entire population) were murdered in the Shoah. Today, less than 1,600 live in the city. What were we all here to see? Was it the names of slaughtered victims engraved in every square inch of the white plastered wall space in the Pinkas Synagogue? Were we all hoping to hear a tell-tale rumble from Rabbi Loew’s golem, legendarily locked away in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue? Maybe we wanted to stare at our distorted reflections in the polished silver Shabbat candlesticks displayed in the defunct Klausen shul. I felt as though we were sneaking through a stranger’s house while they were away. It all seemed somehow voyeuristic and - quite unlike the castles and palaces whose former occupants had been evicted by revolutions – these places where Jews once gathered together to live, pray and mourn each others’ passing had been emptied by the force of inexplicable hatred.

       

     The odd-fitting foam kippot that the museum curators asked visitors to wear as we were herded in packed lines through the synagogues felt more like kitschy souvenirs than gestures of respect. I noticed several of these lying in the gutters along the streets leading out of the district, hurriedly discarded following the march through the exhibits. Buy your ticket, snap your photos of the ruins, and be on your way… but not before visiting the gift shop, thank you. I suppose that any visit to a historical site or public monument – even one honoring victims of the Shoah – can feel cheapened by the presence of gum-smacking high school students, exorbitant entry fees and trinket carts bulging with tacky postcards, plastic refrigerator magnets and wobble-head  figurines. I remember feeling similarly ashamed and repulsed when I visited the ruins of the World Trade Center one year after the 9/11 attacks. I didn’t (and still don’t) understand the need that many people felt to take photos of their groups in front of the gaping holes where the towers once stood, big “say Cheese” smiles plastered across their faces as if they were walking through the gates of Disney World rather than reflecting on the tragedy that occurred only a few feet away. Seeing similar behavior in the centuries-old synagogues of this decimated community felt equally disturbing.

 

       I realize that I really don’t have any right to judge. I don’t know the motives or intentions that spurred my fellow gawkers to crowd into the Jewish Quarter that cold Prague morning. Perhaps many of them were very sincere in their desire to pay their respects or to offer prayers for a more peaceful future for humanity. I tried to find some space to separate myself from the crowds so that I could sit and absorb the heaviness of the loss of the community, to connect with the spirit that once charged the atmosphere in these old halls, but the echoes of snapping camera shutters and the staccato jumble of idle chit-chat bellowing from the tour groups prevented any such moment from ever coalescing. It was just impossible for me to find the silence in which I hoped to imagine the thousands of B’nai Mitzvah and Kaddish minyanim, the erev Shabbat services and blast of shofarot that once filled these spaces with their songs and light. So, I aimed-and-clicked my own camera and shuffled along with everyone else, happy to have walked for awhile in the same spaces that had been animated by the generations of the Prague community, and very sad that it was now so strikingly absent. It seemed to me in that moment that the Nazis’ wishes for a museum of an extinct race had, for the most part, developed into a smashing success. What remains of the community has largely abandoned the synagogues of the Josefov for the Jerusalem (Jubilee) Synagogue in another part of town, their community heirlooms and sacred spaces surrendered to the tourists and the dead piled in high layers beneath the broken stone markers in the old cemetery. Again, who am I to judge? But it was hard to reconcile the feeling of emptiness that overcame me as I tried to balance internally the scene of the diminished Prague community with my warm experience with the vitality of the one waiting for me back in Austin. 
 

 

     Though most of the primary players did not survive the war, the shocking number of repurposed shuls (some as museums like those in Prague, others as apartment blocks, offices, or churches) throughout the expansive territory of the defunct Third Reich bears witness to the fact that Hitler and the architects of the Final Solution succeeded wildly in completely obliterating enormous swaths of Jews who, despite their frequent horrifying encounters with anti-Semitism, had nevertheless previously managed to somehow survive and even thrive for many centuries in Central and Eastern Europe. That the Nazis came so close to achieving their endgame “victory” is reason enough to take a moment to pause and connect with the dramatic lasting effects of the Shoah on Jews around the globe now left with the task of assigning meaning to what is incomprehensible and giving a voice to the un-expressible. A large number of the survivors have died in recent years, leaving their children and scholars to pass along second-hand memories to future generations in the hope that they will not be bullied into inaction, lulled into apathy, or even tempted into complicity in the face of irrational hatred. The survivors who remain will disappear from our communities in steady numbers over the next several years until only their stories are left to tell us about the sounds, sights and smells of those days. Recognizing the importance of these stories, many worthy foundations and programs have been founded to rally the resources needed to preserve the memories of the tragedy – and in so doing, aim to present us with a name and a human face instead of just a statistic. 

     Putting a human face on Shoah victims is one the ways we are able to cope with the incomprehensibility of this magnitude of calamity (if, indeed, it is even possible to ever truly comprehend something as unfathomable as genocide). For, it is precisely the dehumanization of a perceived enemy that ever allows for the possibility of this kind of darkness to take root and grow in a person and to (ironically) transform the monster-killer into the monster. I think that remembering the Shoah through the variety of emerging customs that have found their way onto the calendar - Yom HaShoah, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in some communities on Tisha B’Av – have given us several opportunities throughout the year to reflect on the devastation that wrecked European Jewry. But they also give us pause to consider the dehumanizing implications of yielding oneself to the seductive temptation of hatred for the other, for blind prejudice, for calculated desensitization to the suffering of fellow human beings.