She introduced herself and told us the story of her childhood. She was born in a small village in Poland in the late 1920s. When she was 8-years-old the Nazis placed her and her family in a ghetto, then moved her, her mother and sister to a concentration camp. She was sorted into a separate line but jumped the barrier to be with her family. Later she found out the line she was placed in was for the gas chambers.
As the allies moved closer to the camp the SS officers in charge ordered a death march. Exhausted, she and her family fell into a ditch and lay motionless. The officers assumed they had died and the march carried on as usual. An American scout found them, gave the food and water, and brought them to his headquarters where they joined other liberated concentration camp survivors.
She spoke with a steady tone, almost monotonous like she was reading off a script. But I can only imagine the hardness one must force upon themself to recount that horror over and over again. We asked our questions which she answered as best she could. That by the end it was more about surviving so you could help keep others alive, that the only will they had to live was for each other.
We carried on through the museum, seeing the horrors that we had all seen in movies and museums before. Letters written during the war, photos and videos of the ghettos and camps. It was strange, like it's something I'd seen so many times I'd become numb to it. But when we reached the end, I wasn't prepared for what came. My sister had warned me how powerful the hall of names was, the room filled with names of Jewish holocaust victims but when I entered it was something completely different than I'd expected.
We walked through a small halway and emerged in a circular room. When I entered I was surround by thick, black books on every shelf. As far up as I could see, these book lined the walls, with no space between them. As I looked around I noticed a large portion of the shelves were empty, for the 1.8 million names still lost in the war. 4.2 million pages, stuffed into black binders was more enormous, and more powerful than I could have imagined.
We broke for lunch, it was a quiet atmosphere at first but we slowly began to speak more and more leaving Yad Vashem behind us. I felt almost back to normal but there was some residual emotion left over from the museum.
Up to Mt. Herzl, the Israeli war cemetery, it was what I expected. Graves of Israeli politicians, who we all knew were long dead, did nothing to rile my emotions again. We came to the soldiers' section, thousands of graves in neat rows. But it was what we'd all seen before, in person or in movies, what we'd all become calloused to. I stared at the endless rows of graves, my eyes fixed on those in the distance, feeling nothing for the soldiers that I didn't and would never know.
We stopped at one grave, of no one in particular, and Eilam translated the simple writings on his tombstone: Reuben Cohen - Air Force - Killed 16 November 1967 - Aged 16. Eilam had us imagine the things that Reuben would never be because of his service to Israel: get married, have children, graduate high school. This last one resonated with me, not because it personified his youth, but because it was something I had experienced, something all of us on birthright had experienced. It was a simple thing that we all take for granted, that people have sacrificed so we can have the privilege of experiencing it. I realized that we could play this game with every soldier in the graveyard, and every name in the books lining the shelves of Yad Vashem. And the realization of millions of unnatural deaths, all at once was too much for me. I pulled my sunglasses from my head and put them over my eyes. And I wept silently to myself. And that was our morning, stories of soldiers and civilians killed in war.
The evening schedule seemed poorly planned to me. Our night out on Ben Yehuda street, Jerusalem's entertainment district, was something I thought should be done after a relaxing day of floating in the Dead Sea, or hiking through the forest. But it was the right choice. Not only was this night our last with the soldiers but we were able to drown our sorrows the most efficient way. I can't speak much about our night (partially because none of us have a complete recollection of the events) but there are plenty of photos documenting the event. I do remember it being a fantastic time, and a great send off to the soldiers.
No comments:
Post a Comment