A Facebook Yom HaShoah
April 23, 2009
Holidays | Jewish History
(5 comments)
By JanetheWriter
Tuesday was Yom HaShoah. In addition to attending services, I used Facebook throughout the day to share my memories as a witness to history.
At 9:22 p.m. on Monday, I wrote, "JanetheWriter is remembering her visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau -- July 1, 2007 -- and recalling so many experiences and images from that unforgettable day." You can read a bit more about it here.
On Tuesday morning at 11:31 a.m., I was "remembering Chaim Glasberg whose name is painted on the wall of the Pincus Synagogue in Prague." I've written about Chaim Glasberg on this blog before, and you can read about him here.
After lunch, at about 2:15 p.m., I wrote, "JanetheWriter remembers walking out of Birkenau on the railroad tracks that carried so many in." With this update I recalled how, as my feet rhythmically carried my tired body from one wooden plank to the next, I also was awash with the emotional exhaustion borne of witnessing unspeakable horror: the barracks, the piles and piles and piles of shoes, of hair, of eyeglasses, the tallitot, the canisters of Zyklon B, and the grove of beautiful white birch trees, the last stop before the ovens.
At 3:53 p.m., I wrote this: "JanetheWriter remembers being encouraged to sing loudly during shacharit in the synagogue in Oswiecim. Later, at lunch on a knoll outside Auschwitz, we recited, but did not sing, the motzi. It is no place for singing..." Accompanied by two guitar-strumming NFTY-ites, we did indeed sing loudly in the synagogue/museum that morning, although at times my voice just didn't work.
After a long, tiring day of work and school, I posted my final Yom HaShoah Facebook update at 10:49 p.m.: "JanetheWriter remembers lighting a yahrzeit candle at the mass graves in the woods in Tikochin." This spot, three hours from Warsaw and two hours from the Lithuanian border was perhaps the most difficult of all the sites for me, the granddaughter of a Litvak. To hear my father tell this part of our family's story, it was there, in Lithuania, that many of his aunts, uncles and cousins lived until, as he says, "the letters just stopped coming."
In response to this last update, several friends commented.
"Me too," said Emily, one of the tour's group leaders. "Those were some surreal moments."
Peg said, "Hey, Jane, thanks for sharing your memories, helping us to remember this day."
Judith, who grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia wrote, "I remembered my relatives, including my dad, whose first transport before Auschwitz was to Terezin......"
Indeed, their input enriched my own observance of Yom HaShoah. As I have said often and reiterated yet again at the close of this important day: "It was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime journey and being a witness to history is something I will carry with me for the rest of my days."
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A number of years ago, my wife,Barbara, and I were contemplating a packaged commercial tour to Warsaw, Cracow, Prague and Budapest -- and decided against it, because we felt that going to Auschwitz in particular we needed to be with a Jewish group under Jewish auspices. (As things worked out, we eventually saw Warsaw, Prague and Budapest on our own, but Auschwitz on a pre-convention tour in conjunction with the World Union for Progressive Judaism Moscow meeting.)
But I thought about my concern with being under Jewish auspices when we went on Motza-ei Yom HaShoah (at the end of Holocaust Remembrance Day) to a lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, called "Is Art Worth a Life?" The lecture was sub-titled Hitler, War, and the Monuments Men, and dealt with the cadre of museum directors, curators, art historians and others who served in a special unit of the Allied forces during World War II, devoted to rescuing, protecting and preserving the art treasures of Europe from the Nazis.
The lecture, by Robert Edsel, who has made a cause of remembering the Monuments Men, was fascinating. Two of the surviving Monuments Men, both in their eighties now, and ironically, both Jewish, were in attendance and honored. But clearly the scheduling at the end of Yom HaShoah was purely coincidental, and went unremarked.
We have not yet been to the new Holocaust Museum in Skokie, which opened on Sunday -- but we have been to Auschwitz, Terezin, Dachau, and Buchenwald. We just read at the seder that it is incumbent on all of us to think of ourselves as having ourselves been liberated from Egypt. As I have posted here before, I believe that it is a mitzvah -- a sacred obligation -- for every Jew to visit Auschwitz and Jerusalem.
As Jane has reminded us, these are searing but necessary experiences. While I am not one who believes in a Judaism of trauma, I do believe that tomorrow derives from yesterday. The excellent lecture at the Art Institute was a sober reminder that even when the rest of the world remembers, they remember differently.