My name is Martin Herskovitz. I live in Petah Tikva, Israel and am a child of a survivor of Auschwitz. The last week in May 2003, I participated in a joint Jewish-Arab visit to the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The purpose of the delegation was to bridge the gap between the two peoples via Arab understanding and empathy with the Jewish trauma of the Holocaust. The delegation included 130 Israeli Jews and 124 Israeli Arabs. The Israeli delegation was joined by a French interdenominational delegation of about 170. This is a journal of my personal journey as a member of this amazing trip.
The clacking of the train wheels in the distance awakens me. I get out of bed and look out the hotel window at the foothills on the outskirts of Krakow. Soon another train passes, shrouded by the fog. The clatter of the train seems like a Morse code message to my psyche to begin my journey back in history, my ticket having been validated at birth. I suddenly realize that I may be looking at the tracks along which my Mother traveled 59 years prior.
Even though it is 5 AM I am totally awake, so I get dressed to get a coffee at the 24-hour express stop in a nearby gas station. The early morning buses pass me by as I wait for the light to change; the destination names in Polish seem familiar, reminiscent of communities destroyed. Afterwards I return to the lobby and write down some thoughts. Every few moments I raise my head and look around, hoping to see someone familiar, for I am feeling very alone and vulnerable this morning. And very unsure about what will be happening in just a few hours.
Breakfast and initial boarding pass uneventfully. Everyone seems more sedate and a step slower than yesterday. Once on our way, the participants share their impressions about our first day together, a tour of Jewish Krakow and the story of the Krakow Ghetto. One Arab participant, Youssef, speaks about a feud between families in his village, Kfar Kana in the Galilee. He tells of risking his life to save a member of the other clan whose house was torched. He says that had he lived in Europe he would also have risked his life to save my life. When we disembark near Auschwitz, we walk along and talk. He says to me that when we scratch the surface we are all human beings. Our talk turns to politics and the reporters begin to swarm around, seeking a story. Just as we were about to agree that finding a political solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is more an emotional than a diplomatic problem, Abuna, Father Emil Shoufani, who has organized this historic trip, approaches. He raises a finger and says, “ We have agreed – no politics.” Chastened, we shrug our shoulders and continue silently. The reporters wait a few moments for us to continue, then despair and go search for their next story, our moments of fame now truncated.
We arrive at the railroad track before Auschwitz. Until the trains were diverted into the Birkenau death camp directly in 1944, the selection process took place here, midway between the two camps. The tour guides begin their explanation of the Transport in cattle cars to here. I have no patience for the bi-lingual explanation in my group, which includes members of the French delegation and go off in search of another group, whose members do not require translation. In one such group, the guide speaks of the limitation of language in discussing the Holocaust, because the words for hunger, thirst, and pain are the same words. Shalom Weiss, who survived Birkenau, says that his thirst during his transport from Hungary was so great that to this day whenever he takes a drink of water, his mind hearkens back to the thirst he felt then. His statement reminds me of some lines of poetry I wrote prior to the trip:
“But if I find a language of destruction,
To parse therewith the syntax of the pain.
Then words entombed will resurgent flow
Words whose tears might heal the soul again”
We are supposed to walk in silence to Birkenau, but our group has become splintered from the main bloc of participants who walk in silence. Those who have separated themselves from the main group are unaware of the rule of silence, and talk freely among themselves. Being a straggler myself, a reporter comes up to me and asks me about my previous conversation with Youssef. There will be those who will question how much Youssef and his talk of brotherhood is representative of the Israeli Arab population, I tell him, but I do not wish to deal with the question now. I prefer to concentrate on their feelings of empathy and brotherhood, to aid me in my pain. The time will come for analysis. Ironically, on the day of my return, the weekend newspaper reports on the visit and raises the question of how representative these Arabs are. The cab driver on the way home and my fellow employees all say the same thing, that these Arabs are just a smattering. But perhaps if they had been with me and seen what I had seen they would be less cynical. Perhaps.
This limitation of language I had mentioned in the context of the Holocaust will plague me also in trying to convey the atmosphere of solidarity and consolidation that had developed between the Arab participants and myself during our journey together. The words I am able to find, but pitted against the cynicism and disbelief in Israel, my words stumble clumsily from my mouth, half apologetically. Their melody that had so lifted my heart just a few days prior, forgotten.
By the time I finish talking, the main gate of Birkenau looms before me. Taken unawares, I stop suddenly, and exhale as if punched in the solar plexus, and I raise my fist to my mouth. It takes a moment or two before I can continue my walk and breathe steadily again. Through this gate my mother, her parents and eight siblings passed in the spring of 1944. Only my mother and her sister managed to exit the gate.
We board buses to take us to the other side of Birkenau. The skies today are overcast, no blazing sun of yesterday. This weather is ideal for the walking we have to do. Furthermore, gray typifies the character of the day. I say to Abuna that there are many people who have praised this endeavor but, that it is only when one sees the ideal weather that God has arranged, that one knows that he has giving his blessing. Abuna seems tense. It is a crucial day in his life and much can go wrong. He smiles at my statement, anxious for omens that presage success. The leaves of the linden trees whirl about in the breeze, waving us onward.
This is the area in which the Nazis scattered the ashes from the crematoria. The trees grow tall from the ashes of the dead, someone remarks. But I see the intense green as a blessing of God’s comfort, the prophecy of renewal, the overgrowth not a concealment of, but in response to, the destruction:
For God has comforted Zion,
Comforted her ruins,
He has made her desert as Eden
Her wasteland as the Garden of the Lord (Isaiah 51: 3).
We walk along silent, not by any order from above, but because silence is fitting. The tour guide reads a letter sent from a wife and a daughter to their husband/ father. The girl, nine years old, writes just one sentence of how she is terrified.
Upon hearing these words, I come to the realization that also my Aunts and Uncles – Aunt Leah age 11, Uncle Yosef age 9, Uncle Meshulam age 7, Uncle Baruch age 4, and Uncle Sholom age 1 must have spent their final days and hours in terror and suffering. They have always been for me but wraiths, not really alive and not really dead. But here among their ashes is the first time I realize that they truly lived. And if they truly lived, then they have truly suffered, a terrible suffering, a suffering that they had done nothing to deserve. I begin to cry. Not tiny tears that leak from the corners of one’s eyes, but a torrent of tears. Tears like those that prophet Jeremiah cries over the countless dead at the Temple’s destruction:
“ Oh that mine head might serve as a reservoir of water
And mine eyes a spring of tears
So that I might cry day and night,
The massacre of my people” (Jeremiah 8:23)
I seek comfort for my pain and go to Abuna that he might comfort me. He is the most fatherly figure here. He puts his arm around me as I cry uncontrollably, “ I can accept that they died, God had his reasons for their dying, but why did they suffer, why did they suffer?” Abuna tries to answer when there is no answer, but the words are not important. What I remember is the warmth behind the words, it is this warmth that eventually calms me. I catch up to the tour guide and tell him also of the feelings engendered by the passage that he had read and begin crying all over again. But I am glad at the tears because it means that I am beginning to touch my pain that I, who had never mourned, have begun to grieve:
The relatives who died “in the war”
have faded in and out of our lives,
Not alive, not even the littlest bit alive
But then not dead,
Gone or lost in the war,
Maybe once or twice mentioned as dead or killed
But this is stated
With such dispassionateness
That it seems not true.
So I am going to Auschwitz
To give them life,
To find them within the ledgers and the lagers
Within the piles of shoes,
Within the ashes.
For you cannot be destroyed unless you were once alive
So amongst the destruction I will prove their existence
Like a latter-day Descartes
“You were killed - therefore you were“
And I will finally grieve
We come to the gravestone commemorating those whose ashes were scattered here at Birkenau. The tour guide, Kobi, begins to talk about the kind of unintentional decisions that were taken on the causeway at Birkenau, such as the mother who gives her baby to the grandmother so that she may work. Thus the mother survives and the Grandmother and child are sent to their death. The story sounds apocryphal, so I tell a real one. A story of a 14 year old girl who had to decide if to join the work group or the family group. Finally her older sisters and she decide that it would be best if she would go to the family group to help their mother with the little children. We, from the vantage point of history, look on in horror as this scene gets played out. But at the time the characters in the scene believe that there really is a “family” group. Shalom Weiss believed it too. Of course, the fact that these characters acted ingenuously does not prevent them from feeling terrible guilt. For history shows no kindness to the misinformed and has little indulgence for the naive.
Thus, my Aunt Hensche marched together with her little sister and brothers and my grandmother to their death. Could History been written differently or would that have brought even greater calamity? :
For in a place where death is immanent,
And survival but a chance occurrence
There is no surety, there is no surety,
And fate tempted turns easily vengeful.
The paths not taken are not overgrown with green
But alleyways of blackest cinder
Barbed and spiny.
And when memory allows
My mother travels these passages
And bows her head against the raining blows.
We must learn to be forgiving towards the decisions of then, so as to allow the grief to come. Almost sixty years have passed and yet my Mother has not atoned, in her mind at least, for her guilt. The first step in forgiving others is to forgive oneself. Before I had felt the pain of the dead, that was the “easy” part, it is time now to feel the pain of the living. I begin to cry anew, this time for my mother and her pain.
The group arrives at the monument near the crematoria, to hear a testimony from a Sonnercommando, the Jews whose job it was to transfer bodies from the gas chamber to the crematoria. But he speaks in French which means translation in triplicate, and he speaks with so little emotion as if the horrors had drained all the life from his words. After the passion of my morning, I want no part of lifelessness. I lay back, drained, and of course, to my consternation, I fall asleep, waking at the end to stand for the Kaddish and the Memorial Prayer.
On the way back to the bus, Aziz from Nazereth comes up to me and says “I have no idea what to say” and hugs me. Other Arabs will come up to me during the day to ask if I am alright, I answer that I am, because I truly am. Perhaps never better. I have been bequeathed a wonderful gift from my mother, the ability to touch even the most horrible of traumas, and to climb out from within the depths. If there is strength in touching one’s pain and if there is power in pulling oneself out from its fathoms, then today I have connected with an incredible strength. In addition, today I am proud to have finally grieved, fulfilling a duty to the dead, the unmourned. The Arabs look at my tear-streaked face and think they see a person in distress. I have never been more serene than now. “They jest at scars that never felt a wound.” This quote which runs in my mind is not totally applicable. What I see in their eyes is not jest, but human concern and empathy and I am touched to the deepest reaches of my soul.
After a late lunch we head off for the Auschwitz I. My mother never was here, never passed under the sign “Arbeit Macht Frei”, so I feel freer here than at Birkenau because I have no ghosts looking over my shoulder. We hear another testimony, in Hebrew only, from Esther Manheim. Her voice wavers with emotion. Unlike the previous testimony, I have no problem connecting with her. I am fascinated by her incessant efforts to find strategies to survive. Shalom Weiss devotes an entire chapter in his book on such strategies, for which soup ladler was it better to be first in line and for which the richer portion were given last. But in Esther’s story her survivals are more a question of luck than of a result of her strategies. The best example is the passing of the Camp commandant Rudolph Hess just as she was to enter the anteroom of the gas chamber, who replaces her group with another. Tomorrow Hana Tenzer will tell of the strategems of survival, but here too a Nazi officer pulls her and nine others out of the line to the gas chambers because of a sudden need for workers. How much did these stragems of survival actually save Esther, Shalom and Hana? Very little, I feel, except that to feel impotent, to be tempted into passivity meant death. The actual tactic taken was less important than the hope that was expressed by the effort being expended, so as not to fall into the pitfall of despair.
The groups go too slowly, I have 14 different exhibits to visit. I must see them all so that I am not tempted to visit again. For all the positive outcome this visit has had so far, I feel I do not want to come again. So, I forgo the commentary. What explanation does one need to understand the implication of a room filled with shoes, another of prostheses.
The final exhibit is in Block 27 – the Martyrology of the Jews. On the way to the busses the groups pass this block and I ask Yossi, a journalist, what does Martyrology mean? He thinks that it is a typo for Martyrdom. I am not so sure. Perhaps the Curators think that we Jews have made a study of being the victim, a science of being Martyrs. But we haven’t chosen to be victims have we, hasn’t our Martyrdom been foisted upon us? Yossi just smiles. Perhaps Auschwitz has affected me and I am coming down with a case of Jewish Paranoia, reading too much into a simple word. Just prior to this we have had a ceremony at the Wall of Death in Block 11: some historical background, Psalms, a wreath and a moment of silence. Two days later President Bush would also come here, our wreath wilting in the background.
The discussion groups, which were supposed to start after dinner, have yet to begin, even though it is after 10:30 pm. We are still waiting for the French contingent to arrive. I choose a group in a side room, which allows us to spread out more. Most of the participants are saying wonderfully positive things about the trip and I am also very heartened by what is going on. Then one woman starts speaking about the Jews’ holocaust fixation. I had heard her plaint at the preparatory weekend. Fixated indeed. I, who have spent 45 years in denial and am only just now starting to touch the periphery of the trauma, walk out in disgust. Once again, in my search for understanding and healing, I feel I am being unjustly accused of Martyrology. I move on to another group.
In this new group, Yohanan, who has been in countless Arab-Israeli encounters both in his army career as an Intelligence officer and in his academic endeavors since, speaks about the barriers that have fallen in this specific encounter and the truth that he feels has emerged as a result. It is upon this truth, upon the true characters of the two people that a future can be built and not upon the false impressions we try to put forward. Almaziah speaks of her confusion at meeting this vulnerable and traumatized side of the Israeli Jew, an aspect that she had yet to encounter. This trip has unseated many basic beliefs that she had had about the Jews and she will have to go home and digest what has happened before she can say how she will change. Almaziah speaks for many of us when we speak of having to rethink a lot of values and concepts that we have held until now. The trip leaders, Abuna and Ruth Bar Shalev are very adamant in not guiding us towards specific actions or responses. Ruth has told me that it is her belief that the truest and most powerful response will come from within after we have assimilated all that has gone on until now and what is yet to happen. I relate to the group the empowerment I felt in being able to touch my pain and share it with others. I add that, in my opinion, the Arab response to shoulder my pain is also an empowering experience for them. For someone who has had it drummed into him that the Arab-Jewish conflict is a zero-sum conflict, I have encountered here an Arab-Jewish encounter which is win-win, no loser or winner, both sides with their pride and strength intact. It has given me much to think about.
There are many here that have started waving the flag of fraternity. But, despite the flush of intimacy that comes from undergoing a powerful emotional experience together and the warm feeling in my belly from our encounter tonight, I still feel that there are significant cultural differences between our two peoples. I am grateful for their support and caring but I do not see myself establishing a true emotional bond with any of my Arab friends that I have encountered. Yes, I will be happy to join them at the soccer game of Ahi –Nazerat, afterwards to drink coffee laced with cardamom in their living rooms. And they will be welcome in mine. But this will be a bond of distant cousins, I feel, not of brothers. The word brother is used too often and very naively during this trip, for my taste. But then again, this may be my inherent fear of intimacy that is speaking here. This is one of the issues I will be grappling with over the next few weeks.
A few more participants share their thoughts and then the group leader states that part of the group wants to go to bed and another part would like to continue sharing. She leaves us the option to stay or go. About half the group leaves. Those that remain look about, waiting for someone to say something, but no one does. We had stayed, not because we had something on our minds, but that we hadn’t wanted to let go of the feeling or being together, of being one. Amazing. The group leader says a few words of summation and I go up to my room. Lying in my bed, I think that it is time for my conscious brain to rest:
The souls of the dead lie dormant
under the filmy wrapping of the years
in anticipation
like a child hiding beneath a blanket waits
to be discovered.
Our cries of protest do not move them
nor do our tears of indignation,
they huddle tighter at the bolts of anger.
But when we whisper their names
and cry tears of longing that they have yet to know.
Then the warmth of the tears caresses their foreheads
and they blink open their eyes,
astonished
and stir themselves, loosening their limbs,
to fly down to our dreams
It is time for the other parts of my brain to finish the work begun today .
This time on the bus we tell jokes. Our bus monitor Abed, a senior physician, does a stand-up routine about the travails of being responsible for his bus. He threatens to resign, to all our protests. But he says it will take him a few days to train his replacement anyway, so we should rest assured. A fellow Arab yells out from the back, who ever heard of an Arab resigning, referring of course to stories of corrupt regional council heads and officials who refuse to resign, until the charges levied against them are proven in court. Our group seems to have its own regulator, it knows when to be somber and when not.
At the start of this day, all the groups convene in one of the barracks. Here we receive some background and then Ruth, a hidden child during the Holocaust, from Holland speaks about the picture that she drew 59 years earlier, while in hiding, for her father who had been deported to Birkenau. She takes out a laminated copy of the picture and places it on the brick oven in between the bunks. She has finally brought him his picture. Crying, she embraces her grandson who has joined her on the journey. It is for me the most touching moment of the entire journey and as I look around, it is clear that others are equally affected. Some poems are read, and songs sung as part of this memorial service. I ask to read a poem also. Yesterday, Kobi our tour guide had spoken of the accumulation of names and nicknames as part of living. I had brought him a poem about this afterwards and he had returned it on the bus. Thus it was fated that this be the poem that I read in my Grandfather’s memory:
My mother’s father was named Mordechai Kleinbart
But maybe, because he was the eldest son,
His mother called him Tateleh,
And his father probably called him Mordkhe
like my father sometimes calls me.
His sister and brothers called him, perhaps, Moti
Except for the baby sister who called him Momo
Even after she grew up.
His wife’s cousins at the winery may have called him Kleiny
And his children surely called him Tati
As did his wife
Except late at night, alone in the bedroom
She would maybe call to him with Yiddish familiars
In a soft erotic lilt.
Or maybe not,
Because Mordechai Kleinbart is the single name I have
So it is the one printed on paper laminated in plastic
And it alone is carved into stone
and molded in bronze.
All the other names are exist only in memories long interred
Or on pages yet unwritten.
I too start crying. But unlike Ruth, who finds succor in the arms of her grandson, I do not seek out my son. In fact a few times yesterday and once today, he comes over to me to ask if I am all right. He wants to help me out. But I am all too aware of the transposition of generations that has plagued the Survivor families. I do not want him to care for me, as we did for our parents. So I choose to distance myself from him and choose not to collapse in his arms but rather into the arms of strangers.
I am writing these at 3 AM, four days after our return. It is important for me to get this diary out of me quickly, first of all because of all the feelings that burn within. These are best served warm. Each day that passes only adds distance and reduces the passion. A few days ago the words I read on screen were blurred with tears. Today I am mostly dry-eyed and a little more cynical than even just a day or to before. So I wake at weird hours to try and finish as quickly as possible so as to retain the emotional immediacy of this account.
The other reason I want to finish this writing is that each day that passes means that the present is intruding itself more and more into a piece which is meant to document the past. It is an unsettling experience to be jolted back and forth during the process of writing from the recent past of my journey, to the distant past of the my family’s destruction and then forward once again to present day reality. I would imagine that it is also jarring for the reader For the sake of coherence it is best that this piece be finished quickly.
The reason that I write this is that my mother called last night about the parts of the diary that I had sent her. She wanted to know where my son was. She did not mean that she wanted to feel pride in seeing his name in print. It is deeper than that. My son represents the future. And for her the past is unimportant, what is important is the future. The fact that I have not written about my son means that I am stuck in the past, Martyrology. This is a familiar point of discussions. She, with no past, just future, has no patience for her son who chooses to dwell in the past. At least we have one thing in common. Neither of us have much truck with the present.
My son will show up again, Mom, I promise. And maybe if I were a better father, my son would have been a more integral part of my experience and have been more visible. And if I were a better son, perhaps I would have spoken less about mourning the past and spoken more of renewal and the continuation of life after the Holocaust, about your grandchildren of whom you are so proud. I supposed you would have preferred that I had written before their names and not the names of your sisters and brothers. But these names are your grandchildren’s names – Moshe, Chava Leah, Yaakov Meshulam et al. So you see, we our argument of past versus future is a futile one, because our future is intertwined with our past. It is only our vantage point on reality that differs, not the reality itself. Our past is inseparable from our future because the past is an integral part of my person.
I remember standing as a child
In the lengthening shade of the Mulberry tree
As they read the names.
Their names;
Names that were now ours.
Names like a breeze
That wafted upwards through the tendriled
Green mulberries
Names like the shadow that grew long
with day’s end.
Late that summer I would return to the tree
To pick these Mulberries from the ground
Their sweetness bittered with dust
Unaware of the names that lodged in my soul
Like the tiny hard seeds of a mulberry.
We were to go next to the “Sauna” where the arrivees were undressed, showered and shorn and then given their new clothes. But time was short and we had to get to the Women’s barracks for Hana Tenzer’s testimony. We walked along the path between D lager and C Lager and Oz told us the story of his mother, who lost her will to live and even tried to “lay across the wires” and electrocute herself but was prevented from doing so by the guards. What finally gave her the will to live was that she heard that in the next lager one of the men had hidden a comb. So she ate only half a ration for a few days and was able to trade for this comb. The comb allowed her to retain a sense of dignity and humanity and she survived the rest of the war.
His words about dignity reminds me of how embarrassed my Great-grandmother Neche was at having to undress before her children and grandchildren. Here was the Matriarch of the Herskovitz Family, mother of 11, Grandmother to about 60 (some of whom had already been murdered and about eight at that moment awaiting their turn). She had worn only long sleeves and dresses her whole life, yet, is forced to stand naked and shorn in front of her progeny. What does my mother do in this situation, does she turn away or move closer? The entire trip we have been bombarded with questions that have no right or wrong answers: Which tier of the bunks was most conducive for survival? Was it better to be fat or svelte upon arrival? Short or tall? How long would I have survived? To what lengths would I have gone in order to survive?
Because, after a while, all the stories that you hear point themselves inward. The questions survivors asked themselves, we examine in ourselves. So Auschwitz becomes not only a journey to the pain of the other, but a brutal self–examination of one’s own values and beliefs. In Auschwitz one is forced to confront not only one’s pain and trauma but also an examination of one’s moral fiber. These issues, which are blurred by everyday life, become crystal clear here and inescapable in Auschwitz.
The most interesting part of Hana’s testimony is her last part, about how she abandoned other more conventional volunteer posts in order to further Holocaust education by accompanying groups to Auschwitz. It has only been two days but the constant preoccupation is starting to desensitize me to the horrors. The human mind has an amazing capacity to adapt to extreme situations and yet stay intact. To deny or repress, to ossify or desensitize, we can learn to survive the bombardment of the most horrible of traumas and even return to them year after year. But to remain impassive in the face of so much emotion and trauma is for me an unconscionable cost.
A welcome contribution of the Arab contingent is the vigor of their reaction to the horrors of Holocaust. The Jewish contingent has had the Holocaust drummed into them for an average of about 30 years, some more, some less, so even though being in Auschwitz adds immediacy, there are no real surprises. The Arab contingent seems shocked by what they see. How could Europe let this happen or America? Why didn’t anyone do something? How could the Nazi do such horrors? It is the newness of their reaction, that help renew the horrors for us.
Unlike Hana, my mother does not speak of the Holocaust. We used to resolve our Holocaust issues via food. My mother would prepare it and I would eat. Little was resolved, food was a mere opiate both physiologically and emotionally. It was also her way to say goodbye. My mother never really parted from her family since she did not know they were being sent to their deaths. Since then we have had to find special ways in which to part:
I went to say goodbye to my parents
when they left the country
my mother was busy the whole visit
packing up the leftovers
so I hardly had a chance to say goodbye
Hurry home before the dairy products spoil
was the last thing she said as she closed the door
I stood in the parking lot
laden with Tupperware
feeling alone
The next day I sat hunched over her reheated soup
my hands on both sides of the bowl
my fingers warmed by the porcelain
the steam rose about my face.
as I waited for the soup to cool.
It has taken too much of a lifetime to learn
to live in a family
where you eat soup
instead of saying goodbye.
These days our communication regarding the Holocaust has evolved. Now I write poetry and she talks about my poetry. I have also sent this diary. She has read the first two parts and it affected her emotionally. That means she is not sleeping. In the past such words would have intimidated me, but I am at a point in my life and she is at a point in her life that we both know there is no retreat, no turning back.
After Hana’s testimony, we begin to congregate at the beginning of the causeway for the main Memorial Service to start. I have given in the names of my mother’s family and am waiting impatiently for my first memorial service for them. Arab members of our delegation begin to read the names of the dead as we march silently down the causeway. Soon the names of my relatives are read. They have no graves, there can be no graves. So having their names read in front of all these people, and having these names broadcast to others beyond this cursed place is a memorial that I had never even imagined. I am feeling emotions that are painfully incongruous, pride and sadness, grief and satisfaction. I look up at the sky, in the fantasy that they are smiling down at me, at the memorial service that they had despaired of ever having. This moment alone is worth the price of admission. My son comes over and puts his arm around me.
Benny Shvili, a poet, reads a poem that grapples with the seeming absence of the Omnipresent in Auschwitz and the presence of the divine within the darkness. Afterward I approach him and hug him. I tell him there is very little energy in surety, because there is no dynamic, no dialectic. In our struggles there is much energy, my problem is to focus it.
Our trip to Auschwitz is over. We have only the closing ceremony in the Krakow theater tonight. But that will focus on Arab-Jew aspect of the journey, from now on the Holocaust fades into the background, at least for others, if not for me:
Part of my Mother died in the Uzgorod Ghetto,
Part in Auschwitz.
I have struggled in my life to know if to mince and macerate myself
To fill this void.
But I have spoken already on the amplitudes of love,
I wish to speak now about redemptions,
As I am going soon to Auschwitz.
And there on its paths, it is only fitting to ponder
inhumanity and hate,
Human nature and fate.
But I will not.
I will consider instead myself, and my mother,
and our struggles to discover,
Each in our limitedness,
A measure of closure,
A measure of peace.
Petty redemptions like tin.
I am grateful that I was able to make this trip. I have made my peace. I am grateful for all the participants for the empathy and support they showed. It was not an easy journey for me. It was not an easy journey for the Arab participants. There is much that could have gone wrong in the very foundation of the trip. The Arab participants could have demanded reciprocity i.e. we visit your pain if you visit ours. They could have made comparisons of their pain and the traumas to the Holocaust which, to the Jewish mind, simply not given to comparison. They could have demanded more concrete action and less new-age touchy-feely. They did not, not because these feelings did not exist, I can tell you from private conversations that they most certainly did. Neither was it from any feelings of inferiority or intimidation, for they felt my equal because they truly are my equal. These feelings were not expressed out of respect for my pain and out of true responsibility for my feelings. They have my deepest thanks for this nobility.
The trip has indeed increased the Arabs understanding of our pain, and promoted their empathy for our pain. This understanding and empathy has also engendered a closeness between the two people, at least on a small scale. The coming steps of our journey become difficult. The first step is to try and generalize our experience in the micro onto the macro Israeli and Palestinian society, rife with fears and distrust.
At the closing ceremony there are those who speak in tones of self-importance, of changing the course of history. Stuart, an historian by training, seems insulted on history’s behalf, “Chou–en-Lai, when asked about the significance of the French Revolution, replied that it was too early to tell.” I laugh, but inside I hope there is a happy medium between centuries and minutes. If success can be measured by optimism, then the sea of faces bright with hope may herald success. The hall bubbles with possibility. The true result will be left to the mill of History to grind out at her own deliberate pace.