Yesterday, I made my third trip to the Holocaust Museum. I went with my sister-in-law and her 16 year old boy who said it was on the top of his list to visit. He wasn’t sure why. Just had heard about it.
And my experience was similar to the first two times. The brief black and white grainy film of Hitler’s rise to power…the shtetl with its magnificent photos of a small village, photos stacked up three floors high….sisters, mothers, uncles, babies….all lost. And then the shoes. The room full of shoes with their absent color and musty smell – without size or decoration, a dark leathery pile.
I saw again the emaciated faces of men in striped pajamas and the arrival of Eisenhower’s men to shepherd survivors back to safety after documenting the Nazi shame for all of us to see.
What was different this time were the new images in my mind and heart. Images of my unborn grandchildren who are Jews. They are not yet in this world. I have not met them but am already connected to them through my daughter, my son-in-law and his parents and extended family.
In March, I found myself in Straubing, Germany through a series of totally unexpected events. My brother-in-law’s surgery in a German hospital and the resulting complications… the phone call from my sister asking me to lend a bit of support. So there I was and one night I went out for some food and was carrying back a box of German pizza to the hotel where my sister waited. And I heard the siren. The same police siren that I associate with the Nazis – you would recognize it from all the old movies. I heard the siren and I began to cry – walking with the pizza box. I rested the box on a wall and wept loudly for what seemed like a long time. Beneath me were bricks and I knew that below them were stones and eventually, dirt. I felt the footsteps of those who had walked this street and the stones and the bricks that carried their energy. I cried alone in this strange country for those whom I later came to learn had been massacred or cast out of Straubing, not in the 1930s and 40s but in the 14th and 15th centuries. Absurdly, I wept in the spring rain in the evening shadow, carrying my pizza box, knowing no one.
Since that time about six weeks ago, I have reflected on the persistence of all that comes up through the ground – pushing through dirt toward the light. It is in the tulip and the daffodil which make again their amazing debuts each year. It is in the dogwood with its bloody crosses floating almost horizontally against the dark bough at the edge of the woods. And it is also, persistently, in the human spirit. Those who will not cower and will not stop. Who carry their cherished past and with a great degree of grace rise again to the day, pushing back against the stones.
