The Holocaust

Even though a small blog entry about Holocaust representation barely scratches the surface of what there is to explore about it, I feel a need to expand upon it as much as possible. Throughout my life as well as the lives of all my peers up until our adolescence, we as a younger, newer generation of Jews view the Holocaust as symbolic event to remind us to always never forget the vile crimes of Hitler's Nazi Germany, the death camps, and the six million Jews murdered. Our generation forms a strong connection to this representation through all of the stories told of survival. What was quite surprising when we all learned about the actual history is that these strong connections from said representations weren't always there. It's shocking to know that it wasn't until almost 20 years after the Holocaust that things weren't set in the right direction in the aftermath of such a horrible atrocity. Up until the Eichmann trials in 1961, Jews were seen as just a statistic of all the victims of the Nazis.

When Eichmann was captured by the Mosaad, or Israel's secret service, it set off a chain of events that eventually turned into a complete and more much more cohesive representation of Jewish identity of the Holocaust, that culminated with 1993s Schindler's List. It was here that our generation really learned about how to understand the meaning of "never again," and it has stuck to us, and stayed true ever since.

I have visited many monuments that are dedicated in remembrance of the Holocaust. I have been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel as well as the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, that reserve an entire square to look like the empty, eerie, barracks of a ghetto, with an underground museum under the entire memorial.

However, nothing can ever-or will ever, for that matter-hold a candle to the real thing.

Throughout my entire life, I have always imagined that the settings of all of the concentration camps in Eastern Europe were set in gloomy places with black and white nightmares of swamps and scary woods. But the summer of 2005, when I arrived with friends-new and old-at such places as Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, and Madjanek, not only was everything in full blown technicolor. But in beautiful open fields, wooded areas and plateaus with sunshine and blue skies with not a cloud in the sight. Nothing was ever what I thought it would seem, and that was the most mind shattering thing for me. As I was sitting at one of the large memorials in Poland overlooking a green valley behind it, I couldn't help but think: how could something so horrible happen in a place that was so beautiful and serene?

Emotions ran high during that week and a half long trip. But it was that entire experience alone, that completely stood out in my summer, moreso than my first ever trip to Israel straight from there. This was because we as a group explored not just the persecution and extermination of Jews in Poland, but their lives and traditions that they had held onto throughout their time in Poland. We often visited and davened in some of the ancient synagouges that still remained in tact after the Holocaust. And when we spent our only Shabbat in Krakow we did as much as we possibly could with help from our staff to celebrate ourselves as Jews in Poland, we celebrated with the absolute, utmost ruach that we could use to the very last piece. As we left that weekend, I felt that we didn't just see how Jewish life was in Poland before and during the Holocaust, but we lived it through our experiences of always holding true to our traditions. That powerfull experience alone stands out in my mind as one of the most powerful in my life, and will always ring true to me for the rest of my life.