Remembering

Sunday was Caroline’s last full day in Jerusalem. In the morning, she and Chelsea joined me for one of Rivka Marga’s class, and then the three of us grabbed lunch for the road and set off to visit Yad VShem, the Holocaust museum in Israel. It was a bumpy ride just getting there, which didn’t sit too well with motion-sickness prone Chelsea.

I hadn’t been to the museum since my Birthright trip in 2006, before the renovations had been completed. Going through it, especially with my academic background, felt extra meaningful in this context; I was walking through the Israeli Holocaust museum with two individuals on their first trip to Israel. Ever since I had begun my studies in German and Holocaust history, visiting such museums has taken on a new meaning for me. So many of the places displayed and discussed in the exhibition were places I knew and had been to: Babi Yar, Auschwitz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Weimar. Many of the background locations to the marches, speeches, and actions by the Nazis were places that I have grown to love: Unter den Linden, Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag building, even random streets whose names meant something to me just throughout Berlin. Being able to read the signs and understand the speeches of the Nazis, and feeling connected to the Hebrew captions, individuals giving their testimony in the loschen kodesh, gave the three+ hours spent traversing the winding space a deeper sense of inner comfliction. Reading through the stories of the resistance fighters, I began to wonder if I would have the strength, physical and spiritual, to do what they had done if God-forbid the need should ever rearise.

I tried to help guide my friends a little through the exhibit, being supportive, informative, and not overbearing. The one thing I really wanted them to take away, however, was best explained by the way the exhibit ended: the exit from the museum leads onto a promenade overlooking Jerusalem and Israel as a whole. This, I told them, was the whole point, and what was too often misunderstood: The history of the modern state of Israel did not begin with the Holocaust as so many would claim. Rather, the history and the tragedy of the Holocaust against the Jews of Europe—whose aim was complete genocide many peoples, particularly the Jews—ended with the rebirth of the state of Israel.