Yad Vashem
Yesterday we toured through Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum. As my guide book says “the effects which the Holocaust wrought on the Jewish people still reverberate strongly in the Diaspora and, especially, Israel. It was a tragedy from which grew the modern state of Israel and its legacy has defined the national psyche for more than half a century.” The museum itself is a testimony to the tragedy of the Holocaust: the architect Moshe Safdie designed the building to represent the bottom half of a Star of David, because the worldwide population of Jews was cut in half as a result of the Holocaust. It was a sombering and very difficult experience. Being here, I have learned that I have a need to witness. It is important for me to see things with my own eyes, to observe, to formulate my own reactions. The Holocaust memorials worldwide are somewhere everyone should visit. Yes, it may make you uncomfortable, but it is necessary. The suffering of the Holocaust victims must not go silent and must not be forgotten, especially because their suffering can help us learn to open our eyes to similar plights of people worldwide. We failed to act quickly with the Nazi regime, perhaps we can learn from our history and step up today.
The museum was packed with IDF soldiers: it is a requirement of their army training to spend a day in Yad Vashem. Yes, it is important (I would argue necessary) as a Jew or anyone for that matter to witness and hear this history, but I found it interesting that a democracy would require that of their army. It is a testimony to how strongly the Holocaust and its effects carry on. The greatest tragedy are Holocaust survivors who are undergoing dementia and Alzheimer’s. My friend worked as a nurse in a Jerusalem elderly-care facility and she described the screams and complete terror that would overtake some of their patients. If you are a Holocaust survivor suffering from Alzheimer’s when a nurse comes to take you to the showers you think you are being taken to be exterminated. They absolutely panic. Tears well up in my eyes just imagining that. To have lived through, and survived, such fear and trauma only to be forced to replay it and be haunted by it during your last days is unfair and a horror.
The museum was frightening for me on many levels. It was stomach-curdling to believe that man could perpetuate and maintain such an extermination against another human. Where is the sanctity of life? It was also very frightening to realize the world just ignored these atrocities. Yes, some world leaders spoke up but did it enact action or change? Largely, no. I was also reminded of my own fear. I am afraid that I won’t take action, that I will sit passively by at the witnessing of other traumas. I am so largely ignorant about the plight of God’s children worldwide: Tibet, Sudan, E.China, Nigeria, Uganda, N.Korea, and those are the ‘popular’ ones. What about the mass abuses no one is speaking about on a level that reaches popular media? Even in Wheaton there is suffering that goes unattended, unrelieved, un-solaced. I’m afraid and ashamed that I so easily ignore it. I am not made uncomfortable on an hourly, daily, let alone weekly level by the world’s suffering. Yes, here in Palestine, I am. I face it by the second— but will I act when I get home? To be fair, I will, for Palestine at least. Still, that is nothing to say about the rest of the world’s silently suffering.
Furthermore, I was very uncomfortable by the familiarity of the pleas for the world to listen, to observe, to come take action. There exists a haunting similarity across the world in the pleas of the suffering to an inactive world. I found myself intrigued by the stories of the individuals who risked their lives to smuggle documents, give provisions and hide Jewish families. I pray I’d have that willingness. I like to think I would, but I fear reality may be so much different. So what to do? Lord, I am in your hands. I am trying to learn and absorb but I feel like it gets lost in my head. There is so much, Lord, so much.
