"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.
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