I was the guest speaker at a local temple this evening. It was a beautiful ceremony of remembrance, with music and song…. I may have been the only non-Jew there and I was the honored guest.
Honored guest!
I kept biting my lip and hoping I would not lose it, or cry, when it was my turn to speak. And then it dawns on me… the last time I got really emotional about all this was at the same time last year, sitting in the temple, participating in the service and waiting for the cue. Sometimes I wonder how I manage to hold it all together… and I know it’s because I do not force myself to slow down and think about it all.
Why is this happening to me? How can I be so blessed as to be a conduit between survivors and their new found liberators, the American soldiers responsible for the lives and the families that they have created over the past 64 years? Why do these new coincidences and miracles, these amazing people with stories of tragedy and triumph, of survival against the odds, keep coming to my inbox or telephone, without solicitation? Why do these amazing, interconnected and intertwining threads seem almost to be weaving themselves into a tapestry of unfolding time? In the end, I can’t go there. How can I? Just let it be, just let it unfold, I tell myself.
We slowly recite the names: Belsen, Sobibor, Belzec, Buchenwald, Dachau, Treblinka, Chelmno, Auschwitz…, read the poems of destruction and the prayers of hope, and wonder about the redemption of the human race. The Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, is said.
It was touch and go for me for a little while. In the end, I did fine. Folks were very thankful and kept coming up to me after the service. A very nice lady came up and proudly insisted that she was my fourth grade teacher, though I don’t think that she was.
I told the congregation of my work and the work of my colleagues with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And I informed them of the death of our liberator Dr. George C. Gross. I read to them the eyewitness liberator account that I received out of the blue on March 11th, and told them of our recent reunion and our plans for one final upcoming reunion between liberators and many survivors.
At the very end, a beautiful older woman approached me as I left the temple and told me that before her conversion to Judaism 15 years ago, she had never been taught about the Holocaust and knew very little of it…then, as she made small talk and I was contemplating my exit strategy, she touched me, held my hand and stroked my arm warmly, and told me that I was blessed, and that I had a special place in heaven. God himself is preparing a special place. But not too soon, I try to joke.
The greatest crime in the history of the world. And I guess my own personal responsibility is to try to keep the memory alive, because it will fade as our liberators and survivors pass on.
But not too soon, I hope.
Painting: Martin Spett, The Ashes”
Each mound of victims’ ashes represents a different concentration camp. A traditional depiction of Death hovers over the six inmates of a camp who represent the six-million Jewish casualties during the Holocaust. On the left foreground is the exhortation: “Remember” in six languages.
Martin Spett was liberated on the train near Magdeburg.
Teaching History Matters 