I am haunted on this day. I could not focus on work, health, family, even baseball.
My blueberries I ate for breakfast even evoked thoughts of blue forearm tattoos with numbers.
The light blue sweatpants I wore for a workout on my treadmill brought up visions of blue striped prisoner’s pajamas.
Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, have sleeted into my memory. I’ve spent hours watching and listening to trailers of Holocaust films today.
***
It’s odd. My parents never discussed the Holocaust with me. It was not a school topic. I was naive, and I didn’t read much as a kid. Mainly I shot baskets and practiced pitching and hitting. But my life changed in 1959 when I heard about the book by Leon Uris called Exodus, immediately followed by the movie by Otto Preminger in 1960 starring Paul Newman. It was about the aftermath of the Holocaust and the passionate founders of the state of Israel.
The story totally captivated me. I read the entire book and I had never read a book of that length. I was 14 years old. I had had a Bar Mitzvah the year earlier and went through the motions, but I was a different person after the book and the movie. I was an ardent Zionist, even if I found the synagogue to be a stale place for old people.
I continued my education mainly through movies and TV programs. I followed Israel politics. I contributed heavily to Israel charities. My wife Risa shared my feelings, but she had something I did not have — a summer in the country in 1967 with her camp group.
We visited Israel as a family in 1985 and afterwards. Her Uncle Ed moved there and we stayed in his lovely apartment in Tel Aviv as a family. And we visited the Holocaust Museum.
A turning point in my life came in 1999. My wife took a trip to Poland with her close friend Judy to see where her mother’s parents came from. I had a simultaneous business trip to France, England, and Poland, and met up with her for an arduous bus trip to Majdanek concentration camp.
It was winter and we ran into light snow and icy roads. When we reached Majdanek, which to my amazement was in an open space next to a residential neighborhood in the city of Lublin, everybody got out of the bus but me. They went in the tourist entrance but I was too gripped by emotion. I took off my coat and then my sweater and shirt in the cold. I desperately wanted to try to connect with prisoners arriving there in trucks and trains to be gassed and cremated after their teeth had the gold fillings extracted.
After a few minutes, I walked in and envisioned myself in striped pajamas and then I walked into the rooms where the cremating ovens were. My brain was numb. I could barely comprehend what I was seeing, and then it was over.
I do not remember much more except the Christmas lights in the residential neighborhood across the street from Majdanek. It was weird.
We stayed overnight. Then Risa went on with her trip and I checked out some well used Wickmans in Poland.
***
Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. My mind cannot leave the roster that I read at the death camp. It was not just Jews, but Roma and political prisoners that the Nazis wanted to quickly get rid of and forget. And I think of the pajamas that the emaciated survivors were dressed in when the Allied soldiers liberated the camp in 1945.
I find it sad that the Holocaust is a fading thought to most younger people today. But I find it wonderful that Ken Burns felt compelled to spend many years on his recent documentary about the United States turning its back on the millions of European Jews who begged for entry in the 1930s and ’40s.
I will never forget. I will try to sleep tonight, but those striped pajamas will make it very very hard.
7 Comments
I read ‘All but my Life’ by Gerda Weissman Klein a few years ago. A fascinating & sobering story of family separation and deportation to labor and extermination camps. Gerda suspected that her father, mother, and brother were sent to extermination camps while she was sent to a labor camp, originally making crates and boxes for Wermacht munitions and goods.
When the family was being separated, the father was adamant that Gerda wear her heavy winter boots during the deportation even though it was summer. The father had a prescient foreboding of what was to take place and that the boots might protect his daughter from the upcoming onslaught of deprivations. Gerda survived the war. Her only friend in the world died on a forced march in the snow from the Polish labor camp towards Czechoslovakia with the Germans trying to avoid the oncoming Soviet army.
I did not know the meaning of the title of the book until I came to the end of the reading. Gerda lost everything but her life. She lost her family, her belongings, her village, and her only friend. While recuperating in the Czech hospital she met an American serviceman that eventually became her husband and she lived her life out in the United States. The holocaust was a low point in human history.
Bob, thanks for taking the time to bring us your comment.
My grandfather went through the concentration camps and came to America to restart his family. He ended up in Chicago because of an Aunt that had been sent by her father before the War. Besides 2 of his brothers and a cousin, the rest of the family perished. He married my Chicago born grandmother and they had 2 sons. Today there are 13 grandchildren, close to 100 great grandchildren and even 1 great great grandchild descending from my grandfather. All of us living as Jews here in America with the religious freedom that was taken away from him back in the “camps.” I will never forget the tears in his eyes at my wedding (the 1st of the grandchildren to get married) when he commented for the 1st of many times…this was his greatest revenge…to see his family grow and prosper, which to him meant the greatest of victories over the Nazi’s who tried to snuff out any trace of Judaism. May my Zaidy’s memory be for a blessing!
Thank you. Your comment is part of the victory.
Thank you, Lloyd. My heart beats in time with this subject. Our dear next-door neighbor in Fort Wayne was Anna Crell (Krel) who bore the arm tattoo. Tears now. She and a brother survived, lived in Paris after war, then moved here sponsored by another relative. It is precious to me that we got to know her. How she loved us. My parents treated her like their mother: Dad cleaned gutters, Mom gardened and talked, us kids did yard work year-round, my sister did kitchen work on some festival days, I climbed in windows when she locked herself out. She put her menorah in the window facing our house, and sent us Christmas cards. We learned the Bible early and understood some of the debt we owe to the Jewish people. And such dignity in her manner and her smile. I felt when we talked that she took delight in me. She would take my face in her gnarly hands and just beam. then fill my hands from her candy dish. Our youngest daughter is named Anna in her honor, and she knows the story of her namesake. I looked up her youngest grandson in Indianapolis a few years ago; called him, shared all this. His daughter is also named Anna. So much love after so much loss. I am blessed to not understand it all.
Writer and philosopher George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Paraphrased by Winston Churchill: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
As you mentioned, it was not just the Jewish people that were tortured and murdered, but anyone who was a threat. And Yes, the Jewish people took the brunt of the Holocaust!
How many people have forgotten 9/11? A distant memory.
As I often say there is, and always will be evil in this world!
This has been studied in-depth by Lt. Col. David Grossman.
Lt. Col. David Grossman is an internationally recognized scholar, author, soldier, and speaker who is one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of human aggression and the roots of violence and violent crime. He is a former West Point psychology professor, Professor of Military Science, and an Army Ranger who has combined his experiences to become the founder of a new field of scientific endeavor, which has been termed “killology.” In this new field Col. Grossman has made revolutionary new contributions to our understanding of killing in war, the root causes of the current “virus” of violent crime that is raging around the world, and the process of healing the victims of violence, in war and peace.
David Grossman’s books are mandatory reading for all US military officers.
You may remember at the beginning of “American Sniper” movie, father and son talk of wolves, sheep and the “Sheepdog” protecting the flock. That entire scene is actually attributed to Grossman.
“If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. (bahhhh)
If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath—a wolf.
But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path.”
Lt Col David Grossman
That said, the way to overcome Evil, is with LOVE!
Love of your Family, Friends and the rest of the sheep.
Some of us must learn and be the Sheepdogs!
In Hitler’s Germany, the Sheepdogs had their fangs and teeth removed.
The disarmament of the populace, they could not fight back.
The first thing Hitler and the Nazis did was confiscate the peoples guns. :-0
Imagine that!
As I started this post, We must teach and remember history!!!
Yesterday was the anniversary of Lexington and Concord.
The Brits were heading to the armory to confiscate the powder and arms of the Massachusetts’ subjects.
The first attempt of disarmament here in America.
What did we do?
WE SHOT THEM!!!
With the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World !”
We said HELL NO !!!
That was the beginnings of This Great Nation, and the reason for our Second Amendment !
We weak, frail mortals, always play the “What if” game.
What if I won the lottery?
What if I stayed in school?
What if I asked that girl to marry me???
and it goes on.
What if we had not taken a stand on Concord’s North Bridge?
Would we have not become the Great nation and the worlds superpower?
Would we all be speaking “The King’s English”?
OR
Would there have been no real superpower to defeat and destroy the Nazi war machine, and we would be speaking German?
An ironic question on Hitler’s birthday.
And speaking of Remembering history, good and bad…
Yesterday was the anniversary of the end of the 51 day Waco Siege back in 1993.
How quickly we forget…
The heavy hand of Government, showing its excessive force on a religious group.
Leaving 82 Branch Davidians, 28 of whom were children, DEAD.
Burned alive at the bloody hands of government.
More dead children than at the worst school shooting in Sandy Hook !
Think about that.
I pray that the Creator gave Janet Reno a very special place in eternity !
May we all learn, remember, and teach history…
In 1939 I was born at home half a mile from the Swiss / German border in Rheinau founded around the year 1000!
Early 1945 the Swiss Red Cross brought children from Berlin to spend extended Sommer vacations in Switzerland and placed them with volunteer families.
We ended up with a boy and a girl of age 8 and 9. During our first meal at our home we encouraged the siblings to splatter butter on their slices of bread. In a accusing tone the boy said: We do not eat butter, our Fuehrer does not eat butter either.
That was the moment were I truly recongnized how well our parents took care of us.
My brothers and sisters could not wait every year for them to return until the program ended.
Their mother did perish in a concentradion camp, the father did work for a local newspaper.
My wife did tour Dachau with me in 1988 and last year our 15 year old son did tour Dachau with his H.S. string orchestra. He later told us that everyone was quiet on the bus ride back to the Hotel.
My perspectives of how our fellow humans have and are treated is based on my own personal experinces.
Shortly after my 1962 arrival in the US my boss send me to Gadsden AL, to experience total segregation in the plant and city first hand was terrible. The roots of slavery run deep.
My former wife and our daughter are Canadian Huron Indians. I made great efforts to take my time to learn about Indians in North America. Here you have millions of people whom the US ALLOWS to live on reservations without let them own a single square foot of land. It is stricly Government property!
The Canadien tribes at least have the money to provide the funds for attaining Bachelor and Masters degrees at no cost.
Here is one greatful parent with a daughter who now runs her own business.
Lets hope for a better future of humankind!
Paul Huber LSME