Growing up in the United States our education I believe was limited throughout our High School and Middle School educational careers. Growing up we learned about the camps, who was targeted, why and how it happened but we never talked about how close to success the Nazi regime was to eliminating the Jewish population. When we were in Oświęcim we visited the Jewish Community Center where we learned about the Jewish community in the town of Oświęcim. We learned of how the Nazi’s destroyed all of the synagogues except the one that had become part of the Museum we had visited. The only reason that one survived was because the Nazi’s used it as an ammunition bunker and storage. A building of religion and piece turned into a storage unit for the tools to kill the exact people who originally owned the building. With the destruction and repurposing of the synagogues the Nazi’s did the same to the Jewish graves. A cemetery in the town had been destroyed, the tomb stones knocked over and broken. Volunteers over the years along with the efforts of the Jewish Center have worked to restore the tombstones even though they know they’ll never be able to reconnect the stones with the people they represent.
We were informed that the tombstones were also used as paving stones for the roads. They would lie the stones down with the writing face down to further desecrate the memory of the person. The Nazi regime attempted to destroy evidence of the Jewish people ever existing, not only did they destroy the people’s past, but they repurposed their artifacts for their advantage.
When visiting Auschwitz One the other day we saw more examples of this destruction and repurposing. In my early schooling I had known that the Nazi’s had taken the clothing and valuables of the prisoners to help supply the German people back home. Although the extent of this I never knew. What really disturbed me was the fact that the SS would have the sonderkommandos, the prisoners forced to handle the dead bodies, cut the hair off the corpses of women from the gas chambers so their hair would be taken to be made into textiles. Textiles that would then be turned into mattresses, shoe lining, and coats for German soldiers. This to me was the worst possible interpretation of “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This was using the innocent victims as sheep. When I first saw the exhibit that exposed this atrocity I was immediately repulsed, I held back the instinct to scream in disgust.
In class back home we had talked how trying to wrap one’s head around six million deaths were so incomprehensible. Our professor shared a paraphrased quote from Rabbi Marc Gellman’s eulogy on September 24, 2001 for the victims of the 911 terror attack. Rabbi Gellman said six thousand (911 victim count) and six million, sounds more like scores and to instead think of it as one person dying six thousand or six million times. (For more on the eulogy the link is provided bellow.) I still couldn’t wrap my head around that concept until we saw that hair exhibit. Seeing the hair made it easier for me to see the six million. At the time of liberation, they found 300 bags of hair, equaling seven tons of hair. They had on display for a lack of a better term two tons of the hair, this in no way is close to the six million but it helped me at least put it better into perspective.
In one of our late-night group reflections, we were asked to use creativity to describe what we were seeing. An image of the 1,100,000 Jews who died in the concentration camps and the ones not counted in the one million, fading away with their symbols and culture. The Nazi’s were so close to wiping out the Jewish culture from eastern Europe.
Click here for Rabbi Marc Gellman’s Eulogy: https://eu.thenewsstar.com/story/life/faith/2016/09/16/reflections-eulogy-delivered-years-ago/90482788/
0 comments:
Post a Comment