Rose Bayer Martyrology Talk, 2008

    As most of you know, I took a trip to Eastern Europe and Israel this past summer on USY Pilgrimage. In Europe, we spent two weeks in the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Poland, and one month in Our Holy Land.  The idea of the trip is to take teens through our Eastern European, Jewish history, learn hands on about the Holocaust, and visit the significant historical places before spending a month in Israel.  Most of what my group and experienced this summer was pretty difficult and seems unexplainable.  Almost all 43 of us, carried a journal everywhere we went though.  For me, this was the best way to express just what I was seeing and thinking at the time and keep track of what I was feeling.  So, I felt like the best way to share my experiences in Poland with you was just to read parts of my journal because it explains exactly what I saw and what was going through my head in the moment, while I stood in some of these horrendous places. I’m going to start at the first set of pits we went to, which was the first killing center in Poland we visited.

Lopochon Forest 7/2/08

    The Nazis told them they were relocating them to Bialystok.  They walked them down this path, and made them sing Hatikvah.  They made them take off their clothes.  They marched them in a line and told them to lie down in the pits and they shot them.  Then the next group lay on top of all the others.  They piled up, layer after layer of dead bodies, bleeding, moving, and struggling.  Most were dead, but some still alive. They may have been laying on top of friends or family.  But all of them were Jews.  What do you say? What do you do?  Walking with your children through this process.  How could you sing Hatikvah, the hope? How could they have made us sing Hatikvah?

[It is so quiet here now, so peaceful. So beautiful, but so hideous.  The air is so thin, but so heavy. It is so empty, but so full.]

    What are we even doing here? The pits are gated off, overgrown with weeds.  I’m glad because I can’t even bring myself to look directly in them.  This is not a way to die. I moved away, now I'm looking out into the forest. It’s beyond difficult to imagine this natural forest so full of death.  Yet something still lingers in the air here.

    We had another ceremony after and lit a yarzeit candle for those who were killed here. I felt stronger today. I watched that candle, throughout the whole time. It stood in the center of our circle, vulnerable and blowing in the wind. The flame blew back and forth. I could have sworn over and over that it blew it out. It didn’t. It burned strong. That held me stay strong and actually kept me going. It was so symbolic and hopeful. I almost lay myself mentally in that flame. I got upset when I thought it blew out, but it never did.  And I was proud. I was proud that candle never went out.

 We had a long discussion in the forest and a lot of people tried to come up with solutions and things Jews could have done to save themselves. But there’s nothing anyone really could have done at the time, so its what we can do now that matters. But Aiden ended it all with a thought: Out of all those 11 million people that died, we don’t know who would have written classic novels, invented things to better our lives, created brilliant music, been amazing mothers, fathers, brothers or sisters. So our job is to live for them. Appreciate it all.  Appreciate life for all those who couldn’t, whose lives were cut so short.

Treblinka  7/2

There are children here; on their bikes, riding around. How could anyone possibly bring a child here? Do you have any idea what happened here? 87,000 people almost all Jews, perished on these grounds where I sit. 87,000 lives were stolen, in the most inhumane ways. Why cant’ there be people with this kind of power who do good in the world? So much was accomplished in such a short period of time, why couldn’t that kind of movement and energy and effort be transferred into something positive and beautiful?

[Did birds sing here?

Did the sun shine?

Did flowers bloom? Trees grow?

Life live? Hearts beat?

Colors glow? Did love warm?

Did souls thrive?]

    Could anyone see beauty here? This isn’t life changing, this isn’t eye opening, this is heart crushing. Here the circle of life was broken. Laid out flat, with only an end. There were no beautiful births to begin again when there is death. Could you still feel family and friends and strength and love here? Or had that fallen away too? I will never come back to these places. You experience it once.

Majdanek 7/4/08

As soon as the bus pulled in, I wanted to leave.  A sickening feeling dropped into a pit in my stomach.  Just seeing the camp was enough for me.  An entire left wing of the camp was still in tact.  The barracks, gas chambers, crematorium, the watch towers, the barbed wire, the fences, the fields, the walls, the stones; the path most walked before death.

    We started at the showers.  Here, Jews were stripped and forced to run, not walk, while being chased, beaten and whipped into the showers of ice water.  Directly after, almost all the Jews were herded into the gas chamber.  

I stood in these gas chambers.  The floors creaked as we all walked on them.  Each creak shrieked in my ears and throughout my body.  Those same creaks from this very wood penetrated these walls, this air, and the ears thousands of Jews 60 years ago.  I felt so unsettled. I couldn’t touch anything. I would not take pictures.  I wanted to leave. But there were more chambers, in all sizes and there were green stains all over the cement walls from the gas. One room had a window, for the Nazis to watch people die, so as soon as it became still, the next hundreds of loads could be sent in.  Jews who had been chosen to be workers had to remove the bodies and burn them; the bodies of their own people.  

I didn’t want anyone to take pictures.  I didn’t want to cry.  I just wanted to get on the bus and leave and never come back.  My knees felt weak.

We moved on. Then came the room with the shoes the Nazis took from prisoners.  There were so many-too many.  People wore these shoes.  People who lived and are now dead.  I let a few tears slip out here.  And we marched on.

Next, we went to the crematorium.  I had had enough already.  As we walked, I weaved in and out of people, avoiding touch, and comfort for some reason.  The crematorium was cold cement.  We are all so alive, but where we stood there had been so much death.  Looking at these repulsive ovens that used to burn 1,000 Jewish bodies a day, I felt tears swell up in my eyes.  They would just go in, one by one, and come out altogether in ashes.

After, we walked up stone stairs to a massive dome.  It was a memorial for those who died here.  Piled up under the dome was an unfathomable sized mound of ash. These were the ashes from Majdanek that had been collected.  I looked at it.  I really looked at it, into it, into the ashes, and saw the people.  These ashes were human beings.  Live, Jewish human beings.  I was looking at the victims of the Holocaust.  And at this point, my strength left me.  I had to turn away.  My heart was ripped into thousands and thousands of pieces.  A piece was torn for every single person whose ashes were now at my back.  My heart wrenched.  It was too much.

Birkenau 7/7/08

This place is way too big. The barbed wire; we were walking inside the same barbed wire that kept millions of Jews and people from freedom, and their lives. This rusted barbed wire that surrounded people like, like animals, but not even like animals, because not even animals are treated this way.

I wonder what it was like to go to sleep every night thinking that you may not wake up. This place is saturated with death. People lived, so close to death here. This truly was living every day as your last, but in such a different way. Survivors are really heroes. How could one possibly go on with life after being here? I have always been in awe of Holocaust survivors, but never as much as now, until I walk through these places. It has finally hit me where I am. I feel such sorrow for Jews.

We walked out of Auschwitz-Birkenau. I walked out with every single person I came in with, thinking about how I’ll be in Israel in a day. No Jews got that feeling here, even if they were liberated. Our tour guide Shlomo said to us on our way out, “Doesn’t it feel good to be a little hungry, a little cold, and your feet hurt a little?” And it did.

Auschwitz I  7/7

Believe it or not, we’re at Auschwitz now, but it’s made into a museum.  Although the buildings are authentic, it doesn’t have the real sense here, especially after what we’ve seen.

      We just walked into a room filled with glass cases of real hair. The real hair they cut off the Jews. I couldn’t handle that. It was a similar feeling to the ashes. But today, I took one step in and had to walk out. I didn’t stay long enough to let it sink in, I looked, took a deep breath, and walked out.

No one felt very emotional until the memorial. There was a memorial room, dim and brick.  We all sat in a circle and Shlomo told us stories of survivors. Afterwards, we all stood up and sang Hatikvah.  The meaning of this hit us then. We are going to Israel now. We made it. We’ve seen it and we’ve made our mark. We all walked out crying, holding each other. We are Jewish. We are living defiance of the Nazis. They did not succeed. We are here for those who perished here, at Auschwitz. We pray, we sing, we say Kaddish, for the millions who couldn’t. We go to Israel, we live, for those who couldn’t.

    This next part I wrote in my journal about why I chose not to take pictures in the camps and I thought it might be interesting to share some reasons.

1. I didn’t feel like a tourist there. I felt like a Jew watching our history, mourning for, feeling for, and praying for the deceased. So, taking pictures takes away from that for me. You don’t take pictures at funerals do you?

2. I found it a little disrespectful. I can understand why people did of course, but in my opinion, with everything that has happened in these terrible places, snapping shots of it all seems wrong.

3. It is all real.  There are the real places. It all happened here. I don’t want to bring that home with me.  I will bring home my experiences, my thoughts, my feelings, my descriptions, and my memories.  But pictures, it is like bringing home a little part of it. I know this is actually is incredibly important, but I do not need real pictures of gas chambers, barracks, stains, and crematoriums.

4. If you really want to see it all, you need to go. I completely understand that it’s impossible for most people to do that.  So, listen to the stories of all the amazing teenagers that go every year.  We will tell you everything, but we will also tell you, there’s nothing like going.

And that is all I chose to share with you from my journal in Poland and I think it pretty much describes it all.  One of the first nights of the trip in Prague, my friend Seth shared a thought with us that stuck with me the entire summer. “We are going to be walking the steps of millions of Jews who went through the Holocaust. Some, that lived, most that didn’t.  They all had a dream to survive, be liberated and go to Israel and very few either lived or were able to fulfill this dream.  We are fulfilling this dream for each of them. We are getting a glimpse of the horrors they went through, but then we get to go to Israel. And that is what I am keeping in mind.”

Let me tell you, we were more than ready to go to Israel after Poland.  The feeling of going from Auschwitz to Jerusalem truly was unbelievable.  For me, stepping off the plane and off our bus at the lookout over the Old City was like falling into the comfort of a beautiful, old, familiar blanket. The contrast was incredible. Every Shabbat of our trip our group stood in a circle and shared our favorite moments of the week. Our first shabbos in Israel, my staff all agreed their favorite part was seeing all of us smiling, all day long, every day here.  I mean it when I say I never loved Israel more than being there after Poland. Israel is ours. After being places where there are so few Jews left, Israel is like Challah after Pesach!  In Israel I found myself just smiling uncontrollably and feeling so different; always beaming and happy. My friends and I had trouble describing the feeling in Yisrael at first. But we came to a conclusion: “It’s like our souls have been lifted a little when we came here,” we said. And that is exactly it. To take one last quote from my journal: “7/9 (while landing) I’m home now, and everything is ok.” Am Yisrael Chai.

G’mar tov.