The Yom Ha’Shoah baton passes to us

The generations who came long after the end of the Holocaust are now going to have to step up to preserve its memory. It is our duty to make sure the world is not allowed to forget.

The magnitude and intensity of the Holocaust have touched me several times in my lifetime on a personal level. With Yom Ha’Shoah coming up this week, I decided to look at the impact the Shoah has had on me. Even though it didn’t directly take any member of my family, it ripped the heart out of my wife’s.

Sadly, we are soon going to lose the testimony of those who lived through the Holocaust, and the baton will pass to those who knew those who were touched by it. Gradually, as it becomes history, we will all need to step up to remind the world of the true unbridled terror that existed not so long ago on a scale even those of us who lived through October 7 have no way of even beginning to grasp.

I have, over my almost half a century, built some personal experiences touching aspects of the Holocaust. They are <0.001% the power of those who lived it, but soon they will be what we have. I think it is an important exercise for us all. I still believe the world must remember.

Majdanek

First and foremost, Majdanek. I never went on “March of the Living”, so when I had a trip planned to Poland for a conference which started at dinner, I decided that I would fly into Warsaw in the morning, hire a car, and drive down to see it.

Wow – I never in a million years expected it to hit me so hard. It is not hidden away – it is within sight of towns and villages, and it is exactly like the movies, only completely real and still intact.

It was simply terrifying to see the engineering of death at work with such precision and in such rawness. Until people see it, it is almost impossible to believe, and I guess there was something a little heightened about viewing it by myself on a cold, windy day with very few other people around. Haunting!

Driving back to Warsaw was hard, and needless to say, I couldn’t face seeing people at the dinner – I made a very brief appearance.

My Suitcase

My fiancée at the time (now my wife for almost 28 years) went on a tour to see the camps, and she went to Auschwitz/Birkenau. In an exhibition at the camp, there is a suitcase, in an exhibit of the luggage piled up by the Nazis as the Jews were taken to the gas chambers, with the name: “Benjamin Lazarus.” I received the picture, and to say it ‘freaked’ my wife and me out is an understatement. Someone, possibly just like me, was there, almost certainly for purely his Jewish roots. On research, it seems he was transported from Vienna to Auschwitz on 29.01.1943. Having been born in July 1891, he was actually four years older than me.

My ‘Holocaust’ Experiences in Germany and Holland

I have travelled to and worked a lot in Germany over the years, and it has been a very positive and rewarding experience. It is one of the countries I found the easiest and most comfortable to be a Jew, openly wearing a kippah. I have had a few discussions with German clients and colleagues about the events of the Holocaust, and all were genuinely mournful. I have walked around many cities very safely across the country.

There were, however, a few moments that stood out to me which gave me real cause for reflection.

For 4-5 months, I was staying almost every single week in a hotel in Bonn. A few months in, I was praying in the afternoon and looking out of my window at the River Rhine. I saw people standing around a monument at the edge of the hotel by the river. Having never seen it before, I went to look and was shocked to the core to see it was a memorial with a Star of David. The hotel I had slept in for months had been the synagogue and was destroyed on Kristallnacht. I can’t explain what a chill it sent up my spine. This was yet another sign of the modern German population’s broad acknowledgment and sense of regret at their nation’s actions, but yet another chill at the real, raw actuality of the Holocaust.

During this time, I had possibly the most unexpected and strange moment regarding the Holocaust. I was running a workshop for a client – it was me (with my kippah) and about 10-15 German management members of a client in a factory in the western part of Germany. The session was in two parts, so I concluded the first session by saying: “We have now concluded the solution for the interim period, and after the break, we will discuss the …fi…” As I went to say the word ‘final,’ there was a moment of suspended time… I realized what I was going to say, and I saw the eyes of everyone in the room suddenly show fear and stare at me… after what was a fraction of a second, I said “permanent solution,” and we moved past it.

The sensitivity to the topic, the fear that still exists attached to the connotations of the Holocaust, was in that meeting suddenly exposed for a brief moment of time.

Lastly, in Maastricht

Having been forced to spend a Shabbat in Holland due to a need to be at a client on Friday for a meeting, I ate meals with the Chabad and community Rabbi and Rebbetzin. There was an elderly gentleman at the table, and during the meal, the Rabbi asked him to tell me his story. He – clearly having done it many times before – looked a little bored and said, “I was in the same class at school as Anne Frank.” I was in disbelief. He said that, yes, he sat a few rows behind her and that there was not much to tell – she was a regular kid, nothing out of the ordinary.

That I had the merit to meet one of Anne Frank’s classmates was indeed a shock for me and made my link to the diary she wrote that much more real.

I have a few other incidents which have touched me, such as having flown to Germany on a Lufthansa flight on Yom Ha’Shoah, but all in all, my ‘touch’ with the Holocaust is still very faint.

My closest connection is through my wife’s family, where most of her late grandmother’s family were lost, although she got out on the Kindertransport, her sister was one of those saved by Oskar Schindler, and a sister also made it to Israel. I think over 60 relatives, including her parents, didn’t. I had the privilege of knowing my wife’s grandmother and great aunt and they were truly wonderful people who somehow found the will to rebuild their families.

As I said before, we will all need to carry the message forward and I urge people to save their memories because we will need to support the retention of that knowledge.

May the memories of the souls of the 6 million be blessed.