On Jewish Allyship and The Frightening Character

My time in Europe for my Holocaust History/International Criminal Law study abroad trip last summer started in a whirlwind. After a flight cancelled at 11pm when we were already on the plane, and a rebooked flight taking off at 6am, we finally landed in Amsterdam. Only to find that the airline had lost my large suitcase, which contained my entire life for the next month. Airport staff took an hour to find it, and by the time we were leaving the airport my friends and I feared we were cutting it too close to make our highly coveted Anne Frank House reservation time. When we ordered an Uber from our hotel we expressed that we were in a rush to the driver, who broke what I’m sure were numerous traffic laws to get us there with two minutes to spare.

It was the grout in the kitchen sink that had been in the annex that got to me the most.

From Amsterdam, the Howard A. Kaiman “Nuremberg to The Hague” program would take us to The Hague, Germany, Poland and Austria. We lived primarily in Nuremberg, a few minutes down the road from Courtroom 600. We went to the Nuremberg courthouse, the former Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg, Dachau, Auschwitz, the former Jewish ghettos of Krakow, Schindler’s Factory, and The Eagle’s Nest. It was an incredible program, led by incredible professors and I’m eternally grateful for the profound impact it had on my life. The most meaningful experience of the program for me personally, occurred on a bright sunny day at Dachau, one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany in the early 1930s.

People who have been to Dachau before will know the area I’m referring to, in the back towards the woods. Trees line a path of memorial graves, and placards about how that area now thick with trim cut grass and flowers was once an execution range. As my friends and I lingered over one memorial grave in particular, a woman walking a few feet ahead of us stopped and turned around.

“Excuse me,” She said. “Do you speak English?”

When we affirmed that we did, and that we were Americans, she became choked up. Fiddling with the Bring Them Home dog-tag hanging from her neck, similar to one I wear now, she told us about her father. Her father, Roman Lubetzky was imprisoned at Dachau as a teenager. That day was the first time she’d visited the camp. I wish I could better recall our exact conversation. I remember that in exchange for her telling us about her father, and her brother Daniel who founded KIND Snacks in honor of him, we told her we were in Europe studying international criminal justice through the lens of the Holocaust. She became tearful not for the first time in our conversation, telling us about how important she believed that was. In addition, she mentioned that they’d come to Germany from Israel where they’d been visiting the site of the Nova Musical Festival massacre, and that they’d known people who were directly impacted by 10/7. Before we parted ways, she hugged all 3 of us individually, no longer the only one in tears.

The next day, sick in bed, one thought wouldn’t stop circling. If she had mentioned having just come from Israel to another group, I had the sinking feeling the response might have been colder. Before, I had imagined that anyone standing in a place like Dachau would meet a story like hers with understanding. Not being so sure of that anymore left me with feelings I wrestled with, especially as I became more acutely aware of the tension that rippled through our group whenever Israel, or the war, was mentioned.

In one of the last museum rooms at Auschwitz, a wall of stories and photographs shows where Holocaust survivors built their lives after the war. It follows that the majority of the captions mentioned Israel. As I stepped away from the wall myself, I noticed someone from the group approach the wall, this person in particular someone whose comments about Israel had been sitting uneasily with me for weeks. I paused by the book of names, trying to watch them without being obvious. Part of me hoped, perhaps naively, that seeing the stories of Holocaust survivors rebuilding in Israel might make something shift for them. That proximity to these lives would complicate whatever certainties they’d brought with them to Europe, just as it had already done for me.

I watched as they spent a few quiet seconds glancing at the wall before moving on to something else. I couldn’t see their face, so it’s only fair to admit I can’t truly know what they felt in that moment. What I do know is that something in me tightened, and a bitter lump formed in my throat. Instead of acting on the impulse I felt to snap, I let the discomfort move through me. What it left behind was a small, restless ache that felt a little bit like judgement, and more so ache for a conversation that never happened. A conversation I think I would have tried harder to have if I could go back to that moment, in hindsight.

More recently, a little over a year since my time in Europe, I pulled out my Hebrew language Bring Them Home Now shirt to wear in celebration of the peace deal. It was a purchase from February, in a rush of emotions about the news that Shiri, Ariel and Kfir had been murdered in captivity. After I got dressed, I set off across campus to get coffee and was interrupted by a tap on my shoulder. I froze, a hundred thoughts racing through my mind as I feared my worst fears since I’d purchased the shirt were about to come true. I turned around hesitantly, expecting a camera in my face, or worse, a fist. Instead, I was met with two smiling faces.

“Do you speak Hebrew?” One of the women asked.

My answer was no, as was my answer to their next question asking if I was Jewish. Trying to clarify what I understood as confusion on their part as to why on earth I owned a shirt for Jewish hostages in a language I didn’t speak, I became quite flustered. Eventually, I managed to get out that I had purchased the shirt months ago, and that I was wearing it now because it was a good day. We had a great conversation, laughed about how because I walk so fast they’d had to chase me, hugged, and when I told them they’d made my day they shared the same sentiment. Walking away, excitedly texting my parents about the interaction, I felt emotions similar to the ones I’d felt walking away from Roman Lubetzky’s daughter at Dachau. In some sense, it felt full circle. That choosing to embark on a deeper study of the Holocaust had succeeded as serving its greater purpose in my life, making my allyship to the Jewish people an action verb.

All of these experiences over the past two years have made me feel deeply drawn to a quote from Elie Wiesel’s remarks at Yad Vashem, that I first saw someone share this summer after the Capitol Jewish Museum shooting. The quote reads; “There is a frightening character in all of Kafka’s stories. It’s always the messenger who tried to deliver the message and is unable to do so. We feel sorry for a poor messenger. But there is something more tragic than that: when the messenger has delivered the message and nothing has changed.”

In some ways, I feel as though I’ve failed as a messenger. That I should’ve talked more to the classmate I felt vexed by in Europe. That I should be doing more generally- whatever that looks like. I only have to assume, more than sharing social media posts about the hostage families. But at the same time, I wrestle with the fact that especially in today’s times, the tragedy of the message not changing anything thrives. For every social media post I share about the hostages, 5 posts come across my feed diminishing them, and it’s hard not to feel like the frightening character Elie Wiesel refers to.

It remains that I don’t quite know what to do with that. And it remains that I hold a deep love in my heart for the Jewish people. For Roman Lubetzky and his daughter who wrapped her arms around me in the woods of Dachau. For the Jewish instructor who traveled with us in Poland and framed his generational trauma in a way that helped me process my own, completely different trauma. For Shiri, Yarden and their children. For all the young people slaughtered at the Nova festival, and the families slaughtered in their homes. For the Beautiful 6. For Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who I quote in my email signature. For the women who chased me down on my university campus to ask if I spoke Hebrew, and the toddler they had with them. When I visited the Nova Exhibition in D.C. this past summer, I struggled with what to write on my note card in the memorial room. Eventually, I settled on the following.

“I never knew you but I love you. I’m so sorry the promise of Never Again failed you. From Mollie, not a Jew but also not a coward. Am Yisrael Chai.”