More learned, More Saw, Less Understood

Reminisces and Reflections on the Shoah

By Tricia Schwitzer

I am queuing for soup at the World WIZO HQ canteen in Tel Aviv. It’s lunchtime. I am hungry. The lady in front of me ladles rich vegetable broth into her bowl.  I do not need to pray that there will be enough vegetables left in the soup to sustain me. No, I don’t need to think about that at all. Yet I do.  Even now, five years later.

Five years ago, and I had read everything I could in preparation for my trip to Poland; the heart-wrenching observations of Ellie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Mary Berg, and others who bore witness.

I had revisited the battered old suitcase in our storeroom, containing the evidence of my late father-in-law’s internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, including the rough and stained, striped shirt of the uniform that he was wearing when American soldiers liberated him in 1945. It is tiny.

I read so much, I listened to the memoirs of the Holocaust-surviving members of my husband’s family and had, on more than one occasion, visited Yad Vashem.  I thought I was ready for this trip.

On Sunday, 12th April, I flew from Tel Aviv to Warsaw and joined British friends in the March of the Living (UK) group. We were 250 participants from the UK of all walks of life, Jews, non-Jews, students, professionals, youth leaders, laypersons, and first and second-generation Holocaust survivors. We were split over five buses, each with its own group leader, Holocaust survivor, and educator.  Each of us on our own personal journey to listen, to learn, to feel.

Yet the more I learned, the more I saw, the less I understood.

For the five days of the trip and from now until the end of my days, I ask, “Why?”

We went from Warsaw to Lublin to Krakow and saw the scant remnants of our once-proud, once-fine upstanding ancestors. In Poland, the history of Jewish life dated back over a millennium and formed a vital part of the cultural history.  I was intrigued to learn that in the 1930s, over 120 different Jewish newspapers were printed daily or weekly in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew, serving a Jewish population of some three and a half million. Between the 1939 invasion of Poland and the end of World War II, 90% of Polish Jewry perished.

From the stripping of basic human rights to the desecration of the sacred symbols of the Jewish faith, from the segregation and discrimination came humiliation and degradation and the internment in ghettos. We learned of the cruelty and barbarism, the likes of which any human being cannot comprehend. And yet, European Jewry refused to give up hope. As hunger, random killings, overcrowding, disease, and desperation reigned in the ghettos, and Jewish life was defaced, there were those who, ever optimistic, dared to dream of better days ahead. The contents of their suitcases as they packed for their journey eastwards to Auschwitz paid testament to that fact.

But they never got to unpack!

More learned, More Saw, Less Understood3In the museum of Auschwitz preserved for eternity are some of those same suitcases and their contents: brushes, combs, cosmetics, religious artefacts, dishes, pots and pans. In one of the displays, a lone rolling pin caught my eye. Did the lady who owned that rolling pin dare to imagine that one day she would bake delicious kuchen for her family as she always had?

 We, who had risen fresh from our comfortable beds in four-star hotels, had eaten hearty More learned, More Saw, Less Understood4breakfasts. We, who had packed ample layers against the elements in our backpacks, emerged from our air-conditioned luxury coaches and descended to the depths of hell wearing our comfortable walking shoes, safe in the knowledge that we had an exit strategy. At any time, we could turn our back on the abject terror we witnessed and find our way out. And we did – but it does not leave us.

We visited the death camp of Majdanek and Belzec, Auschwitz, and Auschwitz Birkenau, where European Jewry was viciously terrorized, incarcerated, incinerated, and eventually wiped out. At each place, we stood solemnly at the monuments of remembrance and recited a Kaddish, each of us, in our way, sanctifying the memory of those we never knew but loved anyway.

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Tricia Schwitzer with Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust survivor, an educator, Ziggy Shipper at the March of the Living 2015.

Sometimes, the gravity of what we witnessed got too much for us, and we would walk out to breathe fresh air. I put my hand on the cold, damp wall of the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau and heard the silent screams. I wept and then felt guilty for weeping – for I did not experience the hunger, the whip, the pain of burning flesh, the panic. I had no right to cry.

It was five years ago, the 70th anniversary since the liberation of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and the end of the Second World War. The precious survivors amongst us were well into their eighties. They knew as we did that they are the final witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust, and they have made it their life’s work to share their stories with the coming generation.

At the Belzec death camp, one of the survivors, in trembling voice, recited Kaddish for his late parents and little sister who were murdered before his very eyes. This was the same man who gave me my new preoccupation with the soup tureen. He had told us, over dinner back at the hotel, that in those dark days of abject hunger, it was a lucky man who got his broth from the bottom of the pan because that’s where the vegetables lurked.

For four days in April, our journey took us deeper into hell but on the fifth day, the scene at Auschwitz shifted inexplicably. This evil place took on a different, hopeful guise as some 12,000 plus participants of March of the Living (MOL) worldwide descended from their coaches on a perfect sunny day, wearing their MOL jackets and baseball caps and carrying Israeli flags. We marched as if an ocean of blue and white that surged slowly yet forcefully forward alongside the train tracks that had brought our ancestors to their certain death. We marched as one, against the past, towards the future, because we are living, and we can.

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March Of The Living. Draped with Israeli flags marchers from all over the world proceed “as one, against the past, towards the future, because we are living, and we can.”

We walked solemnly.

As we entered Birkenau, the names of murdered children rang out through loudspeakers. We drank copious amounts of water as we retraced the steps of the thirsty and the starving and those doomed to die. We placed markers on the train tracks of those we had lost. I put down two markers, one to remember my husband’s lost family members and another for our 42,000 slain sisters from the 14 WIZO federations in Eastern Europe in whose memory we continue our work for the people of Israel.  And how strange, that amongst the crowd of marchers I saw one of our WIZO Presidents, Estela Faskha from Panama, and we hugged. Each of us mirroring the emotions of the other.

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Rabbi Israel Meir Lau. Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel 1993 – 2003.

The march concluded in a poignant ceremony. Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, himself a child survivor of Buchenwald, addressed the crowd. Torches were lit in memory of the murdered, and in tribute to the Righteous Among the Nations, and to honor our precious survivors who lived to bear witness.

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Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council and former Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau is seen here on the 15 July 1945 as an 8-year-old at Haifa Port on the way to the British Detention Camp at Atlit holding a flag with other survivors from Buchenwald. Behind the flag to the left- his brother Naphtali.

As they lit the  last torch for the State of Israel where the Jewish people were reborn, and Dudu Fisher led the  March of the Living Children’s Choir in a rousing rendition of Hatikvah, I once again found myself in floods of tears, but this time, I felt no guilt in crying. It was my right and obligation. It still is and always will be.

Today, 2020, there is no March of the Living this year.  The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen and the end of World War II is marked only on the virtual stage of digital media as the Coronavirus pandemic denies us social gathering.  Our survivors are older, more vulnerable, nearer to their natural end of life. They are less in number but forever alive in our collective memory.

And even though we cry our tears in the safe space of social distancing, we will not, dare not, cannot, ever forget!

 

 

 

image005 - 2020-04-19T162649.853.jpgManchester-born Tricia Schwitzer immigrated to Israel in 2001 and currently serves on the World WIZO Executive as Chairperson of the Marketing & PR Division. She manages, writes and illustrates the World WIZO social media pages and co-edited the Centennial edition of the WIZO Review. She is married to Avi, the mother of Ric and Nic Glancy and she lives in Ramat Gan with two naughty black cats.

 

 

“Deep Down, What Do You Feel?

An ‘illuminating’ perspective of the Shoah from the ‘darkness’ of a collapsed mine

By David. E. Kaplan

Pedestrians stand solemnly in silence, while buses stop on busy streets and cars pull over with drivers standing at the side with their heads bowed. This collective conduct of the citizens of Israel is set off by a two-minute siren wailing across the country marking Holocaust Remembrance Day or known colloquially as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה). It is observed as Israel’s day of commemoration for the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

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Siren Sounds. Israel comes to a standstill as motorists stop their vehicles at the sound of the siren and stand solemnly for two minutes.

This year – 2020 – will be different as Corona transforms everything usual into the unusual.

The siren will still wail for  two minutes but the streets will be mostly and ominously quite as most the citizens of the country will be home under some form of lockdown.

In cities and towns, people will stand on the balconies or poke their heads out of apartment windows for the two minutes as the siren wails and look down at the empty streets below.

The image of “looking down” made me think 10 years back  to another perspective of the Holocaust, that of the inverse of  “looking up”!

I always wondered what someone who had no knowledge of the Holocaust would feel following a visit to Yad Vashem – Israel’s official memorial in Jerusalem to the victims of the Holocaust. It was a thought that had intrigued me for many years, and an opportunity  to answer this thought arose in 2011, when 24 of the 33 Chilean miners who had been rescued after spending 69 days trapped in a collapsed Chilean mine the year before arrived in Israel. Hosted by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism for a 8-day visit, including their families, I had been invited as editor of the Hilton Israel Magazine to spend the day with the miners as they toured  Jerusalem, one of the sights being Yad Vashem.

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Close Encounters.  Hardened by their own close encounter with near death, the Chilean miners and their families processing the horrors of the Holocaust inside the ‘death-factory’ designed Yad Vashem. (Photo D.E. Kaplan)

One forgets, but as the Coronavirus dominates the news today,  in 2010, what dominated the news – for at least 69 days –  was the plight of the 33 miners trapped 700 metres below ground in the collapsed coppergold San José Mine located near Copiapó, in the Atacama Region, Chile.

Mesmerized in front of TVs, a global audience was drawn to this heart-rending and nail-biting unfolding drama who rooted for the rescue of these miners buried beneath in what was referred to at the time in the media as the “Deep Down Dark”. People of the world identified with the families of the miners as we all became “one family” hoping and praying for the success of the incredible rescue operation.

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Mesmerized At The Murder. So near to death themselves, some of the younger rescued Chilean miners including a couple with their new-born baby inside Yad Vashem’s ‘Hall of Names’ absorbing the enormity of the Holocaust. (Photo D.E. Kaplan)

Thankfully this story of the 33 miners sealed inside the mountain by a “megablock” of collapsed stone, some 770,000 tons of it -“twice the weight of the Empire State building” – had a happy ending.

Over 1 billion viewers around the world watched the rescue unfold live on TV on Oct. 13, 2010 as all 33 of the miners were raised to the surface of the earth.  Staring at that flat, smooth wall, Luis Urzua, the crew’s supervisor, thought at the time:

It was like the stone they put over Jesus’s tomb.”

Continuing in the biblical parlance  of Urzua, it was as if the miners had been unbelievably – “resurrected”.

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The Hero Of San José. The writer interviewing at Yad Vashem the 54-year-old shift leader Luis Urzua, who had been the last miner to be rescued. His level-headedness was critical for the survival of his men in the San José mine. (Photo. D.E. Kaplan)

In Israel’s invitation to the miners, which was extended to members of their families, the Israeli tourism minister, Stas Mesezhnikov, wrote:

Your bravery and strength of spirit, your great faith that helped you survive so long in the bowels of the earth, was an inspiration to us all.”

From San José to Shoah

With my Spanish interpreter tagging besides me, I caught up with the miners as they exited the Hall of Names – a  repository for the names of millions of Shoah victims. Close to four million eight hundred thousand of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices are commemorated here.

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People visit the Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in May. (photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)

The miners came out looking emotionally drained.

They stood in groups, clustered together on the platform overlooking the forests and the city of Jerusalem – the capital of the state of the Jewish People.

I began to interview them – all revealing their unfamiliarity before their visit to Israel of both Jews and the Holocaust.

Some men are blessed with “nine lives” I thought interviewing 33- year-old Victor Zamora, a mechanic who only went into the mine on the day of the collapse to fix a vehicle. This same man had also been a victim and survived the Chilean earthquake seven months earlier. The 14th miner to be rescued he said, “Before coming to Israel, I knew nothing about the Jewish Holocaust.  I’m still feeling claustrophobia, it’s a feeling that stays with you; hard to shake off but,” and then stopping to shake his head, he continued, “whatever I experienced, it hardly compares with what I’ve just seen here now [at Yad Vashem].”

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Salvation Soon. The underground trapped miners celebrating inside the San Jose mine near Copiapó, Chile, as drilling equipment made its way into one of the caverns, September 17, 2010

Standing next to Zamora, was his former shift manager, the 54-year-old Luis Urzua, who had been the last miner to be rescued. His level-headedness was critical for the survival of his men and his gentle humour was all too evident when later describing the 69-day ordeal as:

It’s been a bit of a long shift.”

And to my question of “How important was your faith in God?” he replied:

We were 33 miners; God was miner number 34.”

However, it was this leader of the miners that revealed to me a perception of the Holocaust that resonated more than much of the academic writings I had come across.

I asked:

“Having been so close to death with your fellow miners, how did you feel after having walked through Yad Vashem revealing how the Jews in Europe too faced death?”

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Miners Avoid Kotel Tunnels. Celebrating Chileans in Jerusalem’s Old City understandably declined on touring Jerusalem’s underground tunnels to avoid reliving the trauma.

This brave and resolute man answered wiping away tears:

“There is one big difference. While we may have shared with the Jews in the concentration camps that feeling of always being close to death, we at least enjoyed one luxury – HOPE. We knew there were people rooting for us, praying for us all over the world and working non-stop to save us. Now, having spent the last two hours walking through Yad Vashem, I know the Jews in the Holocaust had no hope. No-one was coming to rescue them. There lies the big difference – we at least had HOPE!”

Four letters but it incapsulates the DNA of the State of Israel. Jews today in the direst of circumstance can HOPE. From rescuing 49,000 Jews of Yemen in Operation Magic Carpet (1949-1950), Jewish passengers of a hijacked plane in Entebbe, Uganda in 1976, to rescuing thousands the Jews of Ethiopia in operations Moses and Solomon and now in 2020, to sending planes all over the world to bring back “HOME”, Israelis stranded because of the Coronavirus.

Today, Jews can not only HOPE, they can depend on the Jewish state to come to their rescue!

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Let There Be Light. The tour ends with a view of forests and beyond the city of Jerusalem – the affirmation of light and life after darkness.