"Lizkor: Remember" Reflection

Barton Shulman

Job 23:1-12

Friday was Yom HaShoah, the Jewish “Day of the Catastrophe and the Heroism,” when Jews remember the terrible events and the many victims of the Holocaust. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what this means to me, and why I wanted to share with you my feelings about this day, this painful but holy day.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking and writing about the differences between Mennonites and Jews when it comes to remembering our histories of persecution. Russ and I discussed the difference between personal memory and memorializing, and I anguished over somehow coming across as “holier than thou,” as if somehow my experience is more potent, more persecuted, than yours.

I don’t believe this. I think we all carry our own experiences of pain, of persecution, of injustice. And I think it’s a blessing and an honor to share that experience together, even if we don’t experience it in the same way. So my purpose today is to share my experience, a piece of my culture, with you all, and I hope that when you reflect on this day, you bring your own meaning to it.

Jews are taught, from the very youngest age, to remember not just the lessons of our history, but our history itself, as if it personally happened to us. Not just learn it, not just memorize it, but personally remember the experience of it.

During the Seder, the Passover dinner, there are very few actual requirements – like much of Jewish tradition, there are lots of variations and individual practices. But one of the few absolute requirements is found in the specific language of every Passover service. When explaining what the Passover Seder is all about, we are taught to say “This is because of what God did for me when I was a slave in Egypt.”

It’s not what God did for the Israelites, or the Jews, or the Hebrews. It’s what God did for ME. We are taught to own this history personally, and to experience the memory each year. And this is referring to events that happened literally thousands of years ago – we remember that they happened to US personally.

If we start with these memories of the Exodus as an example, the Holocaust happened just yesterday, and its lessons, its wounds, its memories are fresh in our minds (or should be). It seems natural that we carry around a good deal of fear of loss; at any time, our property could be taken from us, our families could be separated; we could be imprisoned or enslaved; our very lives could be taken. After all, it’s not just that it’s happened for hundreds OR thousands of years, it happened just yesterday.

I’ve been thinking recently about why this is – why we are taught to REMEMBER rather than MEMORIALIZE. I think we probably all agree that a personal memory is stronger than a learned history. And I’ve been thinking about another aspect of this. As I look out at everyone here, it’s really difficult for me to guess how many people are in front of me. Are there thirty people here today, or a hundred? I’m really bad at that kind of perception, and could never get a job estimating the numbers in a crowd. Trying to visualize a thousand people all in one place at one time is strange for me. The thought of a hundred thousand? I can’t really get my imagination to hold that. And when I try to think of six million, it just goes away – it becomes so theoretical that it’s not real.

I can’t picture six million. I cannot conceive of six million. I certainly can’t feel for six million. But I can feel for one. I can have a personal experience, and own it, knowing I am sharing the experience of six million.

Recently, Jessica, my 16-year-old niece, participated in a student exchange program. Her exchange sister came from Austria to stay in Seattle for several weeks, and then Jessica returned to Austria with her and spent several weeks there. Jessica wrote a lot about her experiences there, and with her permission I will quote part of it here.

Her host mother, Birgit, took her to Mauthausen, one of the largest concentration camps in all of the Third Reich, and the second largest in Austria. This camp was the location of the deaths of about 119,000 people, the largest number of any concentration camp (as opposed to the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 2 million or more were killed).

Quoting from Jessica:

“Birgit purchased two pamphlets, one in English and one in German, to lead us through our self-guided tour. We left the center and followed a path through a narrow doorway until I found myself standing among various memorials. Here the names of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, conspirators, and other victims of the Nazis filled variously shaped stones and monuments. I walked through the monuments, analyzing and comparing the average ages, ethnicities, and genders of the victims, resorting to my love of numbers and patterns to avoid the reality of what they represented. My cold calculations ended when Birgit led us into the main entrance.

“I stood in the doorway and forced myself to step onto the cobblestone path inside the camp. I entered and walked to the right. I referred to my pamphlet in hopes of avoiding my own thoughts. I looked at the wall about five inches from me, and saw a reference number. After locating this number in the pamphlet, I read in casual terms that at times when the camp’s population exceeded its limit, the weak, sick and old were lined up against this wall and shot one by one. My head darted up from the words I had read and stared out at the wall and then to the ground; the ground where people had stood, the same dirt, the same wall, where their blood had been spilled. Not just people, but my people, my culture, my religion, me.

“I backed away from the wall and entered the nearest building to escape. I went into a chapel that the brochure explained was where the Nazi soldiers would conduct prayer services. On the wall I read Pax, the Latin word for peace, and my thoughts wandered to the Nazi soldier who had just shot someone in the head and watched as their life slipped away, then entered church to pray for peace.

“Passing the Chapel, I made silent eye contact with Birgit whose eyes read to me ‘Are you OK? Can you handle this?’ I felt singled out, as if this was supposed to be harder for me to deal with than everyone else. After all, I was the Jew. I didn’t want to have to act OK for her or anyone, so I scurried off through the nearest door to the next room and on until I reached a set of stairs leading down.

“I found myself descending into the lower part of the building, to a set of smaller rooms. I approached a chamber with the word Gaskammer, and I could only imagine what was coming next. I entered a small, musty, dank room. The floor was covered in aged red paint that was chipping away, and I could see several drains. Along the walls there were pipes mounted low, running along all four walls. I felt myself choking to death on poisonous gas spewing from the pipes, and saw people being packed into this room around me and falling to the floor gasping for their last breath.

“I ran up a set of stairs, hoping to find some peace of my own in this insanity; only to find myself standing in front of two ovens that had been used for cremation and burning people alive that were weak or sick. I stood motionless, staring at the ovens. I saw dust and dirt on the ground surrounding the ovens that screamed to me as if it were human ash from people that once lived and loved as I do. I ran through several rooms until I was finally outside.

“I walked along the original cobblestone and felt the steps of those walking to their deaths. I searched for a spot where I could avoid touching any surface they had touched. Finally I found a corner of modern pavement and retreated there, mentally and physically, until Birgit found me and led me over to see the wall where they would throw people over onto the steep rocks if they didn’t feel like wasting a bullet.

“Finally, I asked Birgit if we could leave, and she looked at me with concern and agreed. On our way out we passed the stairs that victims had been forced to walk along day after day, cutting and gathering stones from the bottom of the hill to build the camp.”

Here I need to interject something that Jessica didn’t write about. These stairs, the 186 steps of the Wiener Graben from the quarry to the camp, are infamous.

Often Prisoners were made to run up and down the stairs until most were dead. Sometimes those remaining would be forced to jump off the top of the quarry, so SS officers cruelly nicknamed it “the parachute jump.” In 1941, a large group of Jews from the Netherlands were persecuted mercilessly. They were made to slide down the loose stones on the side of the staircase. Many of them died in the effort. The survivors were made to run up and down the steps with 50 pound stones on their backs. Any dropped stones fell on the people behind, and anyone who dropped their rock was beaten. For two days, the SS drove the Jews up and down the steps. On the third day, in an act of despair, the remaining Jews joined hands and leaped over the edge to their death.

I’ll return to Jessica’s story:

“We left again through the narrow doorway and got into Birgit’s car. My exchange sister Marlene, seeing that I had been affected, turned to me and said, ‘I wish I could feel sad from this. I know it is a sad place, but I don’t feel sad.’

“I didn’t understand how anyone could experience what I had just experienced and not feel anything. Then I realized that this site had been preserved for exactly that, so that these emotions could be evoked, in me and generations to follow.”

Jessica asks some great questions: Why didn’t Marlene experience Mauthausen the same way Jessica did? Why did Jessica go through all that? Why expose herself to that much suffering?

And is suffering a key to all of this? Is the fact that I grew up as the only white kid in my neighborhood, the only Jew at my school, the only gay person I knew of; does that experience of isolation, fear and pain inform my experience of suffering in others? Is that the reason I often feel I can literally remember events for which I was not physically present?

I often wonder whether this experience of my Jewish culture makes me deeply empathic, really co-dependent, or just neurotic. Being raised with the constant message of “live your history” affects me daily. I find myself experiencing the pain and angst of people who share no history with me. I feel like I can “remember” experiences not of my own people, but of those I care for. But can I truly “remember” being a slave in the hold of a trade ship? Can I remember being shot for standing against the military junta in Burma? If so, how do I carry this around without becoming so empathetic that I lose myself?

I wonder if the specifics of the memories are not the point. Learning to truly remember MY culture’s experiences, to experience REMEMBERING, seems to be the important lesson. The ability to do that seems to be the key to true empathy with any oppressed people.

Jessica didn’t say it, maybe at 16 she didn’t have the words to say it, but she personally experienced the Holocaust that day. She was shot, gassed, burned alive, and she was brutalized by the experience. She became a Holocaust survivor. And as much as I want to show people, explain, teach what the “Jewish experience” is, I can no more do that than I can know the experience of the Mennonite martyrs who died after agonizing torture at the hands of their captors.

But I wonder; what would it mean to personally experience Dirk Willem’s martyrdom? To feel the fear, the cold, the terror of running away from the thief catcher across the ice. To hear the creaking, the cracks and splash and screams of my pursuer as he falls in the freezing water. What would it mean to REMEMBER making the conscious choice to turn and save him, knowing it would mean my death?

How would it affect our spiritual and psychological journeys, if we didn’t just LEARN ABOUT our history, but if we REMEMBERED it?

So today, I remember the Holocaust.

I remember the disappointment of learning that new laws had been passed that affected my rights as an individual. I remember the anger at being forced to wear a yellow star of David at all times, give up the home my family lived in and move to a hovel in a Jewish ghetto. I remember the nagging fear at the disappearance of friends and families from other towns. I remember the rumors of horrific, unspeakable, unthinkable things.

Today I remember my store being looted and burned, the fear of un-knowing and complete lack of control. I remember screaming mobs roaming the streets, the sounds of gunshots in the dark. I remember being forced from my home with barely any possessions.

Today I remember walking past people I thought were friends; neighbors, acquaintances – people I knew from the street where I grew up. I remember seeing fear, anger, and hatred in their eyes. I remember them shouting filth at me as if they didn’t know me. I remember watching, as faces I recognized twisted in hate and spat on me. I remember realizing that they didn’t think I was human. I remember others standing in their doorways, staring, silent, doing nothing.

I remember being packed onto a freight car and traveling far too long with far too many others. I remember being led to a work camp with thousands of others, told we were going there to be “kept safe.” I remember seeing thin, ghostly people, hope gone from their hollow eyes. I remember everything being gray, and dirty, and dusty, and dying.

Today I remember my grandmother being led immediately to a horrifying building with a large smokestack. I remember her looking back at me to try to reassure me, when we all knew that as unreal, as impossible as this was, it was really happening. I remember my children being taken from me, screaming, terror in their eyes, never to be seen or held again.

Today I remember being stripped of my belongings, my clothing, my hair, my dignity, my humanity. I remember being scoured with noxious chemicals and forced to stand naked while strange angry men decided my fitness to work. I remember being handed rags to wear, still reeking of the sweat and misery of their former wearer.

Today I remember days, weeks, endless months of unbelievably harsh work. I remember an existence based on rocks; breaking rocks, hauling rocks, feeling the hard sharp edges of rocks, breathing the dust of rocks. I remember the fear that if I paused, tripped, or fell, I would be beaten or simply shot.

Today I remember losing the will to have friends, for friendships were fleeting and friends were killed without notice. I remember watching as that happened to others, and being completely helpless to even pray over the dead for fear of being killed myself.

Today I remember the lack of food, the foul soup that was inedible but was eaten anyway. I remember the stench of human misery in unlivable conditions.

Today I remember death. I remember the terrible, slow passage of time, standing above a ditch, waiting for the gunshot that would end my life. I remember being packed into a room with hundreds, and hearing the harsh metal clanging of the gas canisters drop. I remember the unique smell of crematory smoke, and the surreal terror of walking toward the building housing the ovens.

But today I also remember determination. I remember pushing when it seemed impossible to push. I remember being slipped the tiniest piece of bread when it seemed I was too weak to go on. I remember seeing small, almost invisible acts of kindness which helped someone live another moment, another day.

Today I remember the bravery of my neighbors. I remember them building hidden doors, hidden rooms, hidden sanctuaries. I remember them hiding me when hiding a Jew meant certain death.

Today I remember secretly, almost silently, sneaking and gathering to pray to a God who didn’t seem to be listening, but praying just the same, for there was no other choice but to pray.

So today, I remember.