Three very significant dates are coming up in Israel. April 21 will be the Memorial Day for the victims of the Holocaust. April 28 will be the Memorial Day for all soldiers, police officers and others who gave their lives to defend Israel. April 29 will be Israel’s Independence Day.
Memorial Day for the Holocaust starts in the evening. Ceremonies take place throughout the country. Entertainment is practically illegal. A regular lineup of WWII and Holocaust films and documentaries is on all public television channels and radio stations. The highlight of the day is the air raid siren goes off at 11:00 before noon, and every single person in the country that cares about that epic sized disaster experienced by European and North African Jews, stands up for two minutes. Most of the traffic in the country is stopped for these two minutes. Some people actually spend a few minutes during the day and actually remember. They remember the big things. Like human beings putting other human beings in ghettos, then moving them in large trains, like cattle, into death camps, where they are killed in a very organized and orderly way, gunned down or simply with poisonous gas. Some remember the Liberation, the American troops. Others remember the few and futile rebellions, the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion is the one that’s most discussed.
As for me, I have two major differences in the way I personally commemorate the Holocaust Memorial Day. For one, I experience it every day of the year. Brought up by a Holocaust survivor, a woman who was born in a camp, I never really had a choice. In addition, I rarely stop to think about the major events. Don’t get me wrong, I know them all, with dates and details. But Holocaust for me is names with no faces – and sometimes even trickier, no names and no faces, like some spirits in the dark, you know they are there, but you cannot touch or see them. Like my great aunt Hannah, who never made it out of the camps, but has three other Hannahs named after her. Like my great uncle Max, who was lost in Germany after the war for over thirty years. Like my great uncle Abraham (Boom) who was lost in Russia, never (never) to be seen by his family again (he died about a dozen years ago). Holocaust for me are bed time stories about my grandfather, who had to make a choice between supporting his wife and two little girls, or his parents. (Lucky for me, he chose the wife and two little girls, his parents perished of starvation). The tales of the same grandfather, sneaking out of the camp, walking dozens of miles in the snow, working for Ukranian farmers in return for a loaf of bread, which he saved wholly for the family. Stories about my grandmother who sold all her jewelry for food, who participated in a death march, but ended up bringing her family to safety. Holocaust for me is Zeida, my great grandfather, whose skills and resourcefulness lead some of the family out of the horror. Holocaust for me is my mother, a three year old child with typhoid carried by her mother, my grandmother, on a death march. The knowledge that my grandmother was being told one time after the other, that abandoning the child on the side of the road and let her freeze to death would be an even more humane thing to do than carrying her to an unknown destination if any. Knowing and thanking my brave grandmother for not giving up.
And lastly, but certainly not least, is knowing that my grandparents who did survive that horror, died at old age, and saw children, grandchildren and great grandchildren before their time was up, is to some degree a consolation. Knowing that my children are growing without the fears of death marches and starvation, is yet another one.
I experience the daily question: would I have survived that? Would I have been able to care for my wife and children during years of starvation? Yes, you would say, you (that’s me) are resourceful, you would have survived. If anyone had a chance to survive that madness, it would have had to be you. Nice to hear, but the question remains. In short, while I love subjecting myself to the TV lineup of black and white shows, to the parade of fading people who were actually there, to the tears, and that choking feeling that follows when something strikes a chord, I do have to deal with it every single day of my life.
And the thought that soon enough the stories will be all that’s left to rebuff the Holocaust Deniers, the people who suggest that this never took place, or that it did but in a minor way, that the gas chambers was a Jewish idea. To those let me just tell the story of these two sweet old ladies from the Bronx, New York whom I was fortunate to have met years ago. I doubt if any of them is still alive, and I doubt that anyone has ever told their story. These two ladies were teenagers in Auschwitz, and besides doing the regular things that teenagers do, they were also in charge of getting dead bodies into the gas chambers, and clean up the remainders when the process was over. For that work, they were kept barely alive and had the privilege of spending an occasional hour of forced love with a German guard. They were doing it for a couple of years. What struck me in their stories was that they said that the hardest part for them was when the Germans fled the camp, and they were left with no food at all for a few days until the American showed up. They said they had to eat grass and roots to survive. They went their own way, married and had children and grandchildren, but kept in touch during all those years. Only when both their husbands died, did they move in together. I saw them, I spoke to them, trust me, I wish it weren’t true, but it was. And the scariest part for us all, is that once it happens, it could potentially happen again.
Memorial Day comes, for all the soldiers, police officers, and others who gave their lives for Israel’s defense, is a different story. Yes I have served in the military, and yes I have known quite a few who lost their lives. But I need to be reminded. I need the time slot to remember, to respect, to appreciate the contribution and the sacrifice. The ultimate sacrifice made by these men and women. I listen to the never ending song lineup on the radio, war songs, sad songs, ballads. It touches a chord. But I must admit, a soldier’s job is to defend his or her country. When a soldier dies in action, I see it, exactly as it is referred to: “killed in the line of duty”. Sure, it is a tragedy for the family and the friends. But dying with a weapon in one’s hands is a completely different story than the dying in a gas chambers. Indeed, there is no glory in death, no matter what death that is. But still. (And to all who are going to talk about the Israeli Military doing some horrible things in Gaza and elsewhere, about the American, French, British, Spanish armies performing some serious unethical acts during combat, I suggest that the distance between the occasional unethical deplorable act, and the organized killing of another people is pretty damn large).
Independence Day is the day, the only day, that suggests that sacrifices made by the first and the second populations, gave us, the third population, the one that lives proudly here in Israel, the right as well as the means to live here. I did say before one thing about the Holocaust – we should all be afraid, because once it happens, there’s a potential for it to happen again. By the same token, once a people experiences an organized genocide, it becomes very important to it to have a military, and a defense mechanism, such that if its death is sought again, it will be prepared, and will die fighting if necessary.
There you have it. April 21st to April 29, a week in a people’s life…
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