Zachor זכור -- Let Us Not Forget.
Recently I went to a talk by Ben Lesser, a survivor of the
Nazi Death Camps. I listened to his story of beatings and hunger, the
wailing of burning children, and ashes that fell like snowflakes. His speaking
engagement preceded Holocaust Remembrance Day, which corresponds to the 27th
day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar—April 24, 2017 this year for many in the
western world. It commemorates Shoah, an era when the Nazis displaced and murdered
millions of Jews. The Nazis continued the carnage when they exterminated the
disabled. They also snuffed out the lives of countless Gypsies and some sects
of Christians. They permanently silenced those that disagreed with them. They
invaded neighboring countries and also killed their Jews, disabled, Gypsies and
those that attempted to fight them physically or ideologically.
Forty years ago when I first heard about Shoah I asked my German-born
mother Ann, who was a child during World War Two, “Why did the soldiers starve
the prisoners? Why did the soldiers shave their captives’ heads?” As my mother
gently told me about World War Two era Germany, she dug deep into her soul, to
try to give life to memories that she’d buried deep inside.
Both my mother and grandmother had what would now be called
“post-traumatic stress disorder” or PTSD. My grandmother Karola disliked Adolf
Hitler and despite Der Führer’s hypnotizing voice, she said, in essence, that
the man was insane. Before my grandfather went off to war, he cautioned Karola
to never speak out loud against Hitler—ever. It wasn’t that my grandfather was
a big fan of the German Chancellor; it was that he knew speaking out could lead
to death and imprisonment. Another
instance that led to my mother’s PTSD was the horrific rape and murder of her
cousin by Russian soldiers.
Frequently my mother had to take cover in bomb shelters. One time, she was visiting relatives in
Mannheim. My grandparents felt that Mannheim was a safe place since it was
known for its culture and arts and beautiful palace. Nonetheless, British
war-planes dropped bombs, explosives, and incendiaries on the city. My relatives sought shelter. There were people
still outside the door, pounding and pleading to be let inside, and with every
bomb, the structure shook as if it was inside a thundercloud. Once the “All
Clear” was given, the door was opened. Some of the people were still alive. The
relatives found one of my mother’s cousins outside of the shelter; the young
woman’s head had been so traumatized that her eyes had hemorrhaged and the sclera
surrounding her pupils were blood red. She’d also been trampled and was barely
alive. There are far too many instances of air-raids and running for cover for
me to remember or list. After one such night, as my mother left the shelter the
next morning, she looked around in horror: people and animals hung in pieces from
the shattered tree limbs.
During this era, my great uncle was arrested by SS agents
after he’d gotten into an argument with them. He’d been drinking, and as he
wheeled his bike shakily from the biergarten, the agents were waiting for him.
They beat the poor man and put him into a concentration camp. This is just one
instance of what the German government did to its own Christian citizens. What they did to Jewish citizens was savagely
cruel—but it happened.
My mother went on to tell me that during the war, there was
very little to eat, sometimes no food at all for the common German citizen. Oh,
most likely top Nazis fed on the best sausages and pastries, but every-day
people were starving. For a time her family had rabbits. Mother and her young
brother Heinz gathered weeds and grass for the little animals. Sometimes her
father would cook a couple rabbits, preparing a special meal steeped in a rich
cream sauce; but after a bomb fell on their apartment, there was no more fresh
meat.
“None of us had food. Not even a potato. If the government
couldn’t find food for its people, if markets were rubble, if there was no way
for us to work and obtain food, how were the soldiers expected to feed the
people in the concentration camps? I’m sure the commanders and big shots in the
offices ate like kings, but do you think they would share with the Jews? NO!”
Mother continued, quietly “To answer your other question,
heads were shaved because of the lice. Everyone had them back then. One time we
lined up for a bath-house. It was a common practice. Many people did not have
plumbing, but we were allowed to bathe sometimes in these showers; women and
small children in one line and men in the other. Once, a woman in front of me
let her pretty, long dark hair down. She shook it loose and I could see the
nits and lice on her! Then we went through the doors to shower. After that, I
had lice too, as did my brother!” The
shower could not wash off what had dropped on her body and belongings. Until the
day she died, my mother could not stand the smell of hair, especially unwashed
tresses.
Her stories gave me a different perspective.
Once, my mother told me of the time when she was a young
adolescent. She was deathly ill from diphtheria and nearly died. In Ann’s young
life, she had suffered every childhood illness known at that time, and this one
was closing off her throat. Karola left the bedroom and my mother resolved to
die. She closed her eyes, but opened them again. There at the edge of Ann’s bed
sat “Death”. Through blurred vision she stared at him in disbelief. He was not
dressed in a black robe, but wore clothes that were barely rags. The specter gazed down upon her with pity. He
looked like a skeleton. Ann could see ribs through his thin clothing. She
couldn’t be sure—did the monster even have eyeballs? All she could see were
black rimmed, hollow orbs where the eyes should be. Ann covered her face and
peeked once more, yet there it remained, that dark angel. Death was now sitting
closer to her, staring down. Ann squeezed her eyes tightly. When she looked
again the apparition had disappeared. Karola was there about to spoon something
into Ann’s throat. My mother tried to explain that the Angel of Death almost
took her soul, but was unable to speak. Karola soothed the frightened girl and
forced the medicine upon her child.
My mother told the story to only her family and closest
friends. She opened up a little more in the decades following the war. In the
late 1980s, Mother made one of her last trips back to Germany. She was at a
party and saw a very old man she used to know and almost did not recognize him.
He asked her to dance and she said, “I have not seen you since I was very
little, before the war!”
The man said, “Anneliese, we saw each other afterwards, but
maybe you do not remember? You were so very sick. I’d just gotten out of a
concentration camp. I found your family somehow, before I even found my own. Karola
asked me inside and made a special request: would I watch you while she went to
get some medicine. I sat at the edge of your bed and you stared at me for a
long time, then drifted off to sleep. I was not sure if you were alive until
you struggled for a breath or two. When you awoke again, you couldn’t take your
gaze from me. You fell asleep and soon your mother returned with the medicine.”
Ann, at that time nearing sixty herself, hugged the old man
and told him her story. “I thought you were the Angel of Death! I told people
that Death had come for me, but it was you!”
In her mind and from her perspective, Death was an actual
creature that truly had a face. Until her eyes were truly opened to the facts,
she insisted this “angel” had come to take her life.
When I was a child, I did not know that most people in
Europe were starving and infested with parasites and disease–that is, until my
mother told me. Again, what the Nazis did to their own citizens was
unconscionable. What they did to the people of the surrounding countries was
amoral. What they did to the Jewish people is truly unbelievable. Ben Lesser
himself said that he and many of his fellow prisoners could not believe that a
civilized, cultured people could do this to their fellow humans in the 20th
Century.
I will add perspective is one thing; complete denial is
another. Many people can have a shared experience and come out of it with a
different story or nuance of it. Yet, there are those that deny that the
Holocaust even happened. There are photographs of the dying, the dead, and the
walking dead. These snapshots came from many sources: the German government,
the allied soldiers that liberated the prisoners etc. There were plans and
blueprints of the death camps discovered after the Allies arrived. There were
the personal narratives of Nazi soldiers, American soldiers and the people that
somehow survived places like Dachau, Auschwitz, Chelmno, Bergen-Belsen and
others.
Yet, there are individuals and groups that state, as fact,
that there was no wholesale slaughter of eleven million people. They deny that
there were gas chambers, ovens, mass graves, starvation and forced labor. They do
not acknowledge that there are buildings that still stand as a testament to
mankind’s cruelty to man. Whatever the reason, they deny the truth. Their
argument is not a “perspective” or a subjective deliberation of who actually
died. These people discredit the evidence altogether. Those soldiers that
liberated the victims are dying. The individuals that survived the horrors are
perishing. All that is left are their stories, pictures and memorials. Please,
take a moment to visit these online tributes. If you ever get the chance to see
one of the many death camps that is open to the public as a standing,
interactive testimony to the mass carnage and systematic execution of millions
of people, I urge you to do so –
lest we forget.
Zachor זכור
. Remember.
Forgive.
