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.
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”).
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.
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