Has it really been 20 years?
Apr. 17th, 2014 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osodecanelaMemory can be a joy and a curse. I was speaking with a friend yesterday about family of origin stuff, and somehow the conversation turned to the Nat'l Holocaust Museum in DC.
About a year before losing my father, I journeyed east to visit my family, stopping first to visit DC and and a friend I knew via AOL, but had never physically met. I spent two days in DC with her, one afternoon of which we spent at the then brand new museum, which had only opened a year earlier. I had very much wanted to visit it, but having lost the bulk of my mom's family in the holocaust, I wisely opted not go alone.
It was a difficult visit, walking thru exhibit after exhibit. Some where uplifting, particularly the tales of the righteous who fought save people from the torture and extermination in the camps, often at great personal peril. Others were chilling. Standing inside one of the actual railway cattle cars to carried people to the camps, and laying my hand on the barrack shelving the served as bunks in Bergen Belsen left me silent and trying to listen for the voices of those victims long gone of that immense cruelty. I translated for 3 young Latinas who were perplexed by the humungous pile of shoes, men's, women's and children's, footwear that had been taken from victims as they arrived at Auschwitz moments before each owner was put to death. Two of them burst into tears as I spoke and the third looked at me with sorrow as she uttered the words "nunca otra vez" (never again). Seeing the uniforms that prisoners wee given to wear, including some that bore the pink triangle marking the inmate as a gay man
Through out it all, I managed to hold onto it, until I was in the stairwell moving between floors. The walls were of glass brick and etched into them were the names of towns - shtetls the Nazis had taken off the map. There, at eye level, was the town my grandmother left behind, the town where my great grandparents lived, the great grandfather I was named for, the town where all her siblings remained save the lone brother she joined in this country, the place every last one of her family perished at the hands of the Gestapo. I stood there, my fingers tracing out the letters of the town, as tears streamed down my face, grieving for family I never got the chance to meet, the chance to know, the chance to welcome, the chance to love. My great grandparents sent grandma at 16 to this country for a shot at a better life, one of opportunity, of freedom from persecution. Little did they know they would never live to see her again. Little did they know that she and her brother would be their only legacy to survive in this world.
I relived those moments in that stairwell yesterday. Without much warning, it felt as if I had been at that glass brick just five minutes before, not 20 years. My tears flowed quietly, as they did that day.
And I wondered, as I drove in this morning listening to NPR, as a reporter from Syria recounted the murder of a Dutch priest in her town, a priest who had lived and worked there across all ecumenical lines in Homs for 50 years, only to be sought out and shot dead in the monastery were he lived by a lone masked gunman who sat him down and executed him at point blank range, how will we ever had a world where nunca otra vez is a reality.
About a year before losing my father, I journeyed east to visit my family, stopping first to visit DC and and a friend I knew via AOL, but had never physically met. I spent two days in DC with her, one afternoon of which we spent at the then brand new museum, which had only opened a year earlier. I had very much wanted to visit it, but having lost the bulk of my mom's family in the holocaust, I wisely opted not go alone.
It was a difficult visit, walking thru exhibit after exhibit. Some where uplifting, particularly the tales of the righteous who fought save people from the torture and extermination in the camps, often at great personal peril. Others were chilling. Standing inside one of the actual railway cattle cars to carried people to the camps, and laying my hand on the barrack shelving the served as bunks in Bergen Belsen left me silent and trying to listen for the voices of those victims long gone of that immense cruelty. I translated for 3 young Latinas who were perplexed by the humungous pile of shoes, men's, women's and children's, footwear that had been taken from victims as they arrived at Auschwitz moments before each owner was put to death. Two of them burst into tears as I spoke and the third looked at me with sorrow as she uttered the words "nunca otra vez" (never again). Seeing the uniforms that prisoners wee given to wear, including some that bore the pink triangle marking the inmate as a gay man
Through out it all, I managed to hold onto it, until I was in the stairwell moving between floors. The walls were of glass brick and etched into them were the names of towns - shtetls the Nazis had taken off the map. There, at eye level, was the town my grandmother left behind, the town where my great grandparents lived, the great grandfather I was named for, the town where all her siblings remained save the lone brother she joined in this country, the place every last one of her family perished at the hands of the Gestapo. I stood there, my fingers tracing out the letters of the town, as tears streamed down my face, grieving for family I never got the chance to meet, the chance to know, the chance to welcome, the chance to love. My great grandparents sent grandma at 16 to this country for a shot at a better life, one of opportunity, of freedom from persecution. Little did they know they would never live to see her again. Little did they know that she and her brother would be their only legacy to survive in this world.
I relived those moments in that stairwell yesterday. Without much warning, it felt as if I had been at that glass brick just five minutes before, not 20 years. My tears flowed quietly, as they did that day.
And I wondered, as I drove in this morning listening to NPR, as a reporter from Syria recounted the murder of a Dutch priest in her town, a priest who had lived and worked there across all ecumenical lines in Homs for 50 years, only to be sought out and shot dead in the monastery were he lived by a lone masked gunman who sat him down and executed him at point blank range, how will we ever had a world where nunca otra vez is a reality.
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Date: 2014-04-17 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-18 08:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-22 07:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-19 12:27 am (UTC)*hugs*
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Date: 2014-04-22 07:35 am (UTC)My family on both sides understood oppression first hand. Pop's side came over from Belarus and the Ukraine more or less en masse, leaving few behind, but they experienced some of the depravities our species is capable of too. My father's mother's last memory of her mother was her mom hiding my grandmother & her sister in a pickle barrel just before a pogrom. Grandma was 6. Aunt Edith was 5. They lost their mother and an older brother that day.
In my childhood, I heard my father's father say, "the Jew who is not paranoid is a fool." I never had to ask why.