“Heil Hitler,” I greeted my mother one day after school. I was 10 years old and had learned the expression from my non- Jewish classmates at Grant School in Davenport, Iowa.
That afternoon in 1958 marked the beginning of my introduction to the Nazis.
“How many Jews did they kill?” I asked.
“Six million.”
“But how could they kill that many? You can’t just line up 6 million people and shoot them with guns.”
My mother’s answer, a somber and restrained explanation of the gas chambers, began my exploration into Nazi Germany, an era that defies understanding, description and belief.
It was with that same sense of disbelief that my husband, Larry, and I recently walked through the entrance of Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside of Berlin.
We were greeted by the familiar and chilling words, “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes you free), embedded in the iron gates.
Perhaps because Sachsenhausen, in the small town of Oranienburg, is located in the former and highly revisionist state of East Germany, I had never heard of it.
But I quickly discovered that it was built with the goal of being, in the words of Heinrich Himmler, “a modern, completely up-to-date concentration camp,” and that from 1936 to 1945 it imprisoned, tortured and killed more than 200,000 Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political prisoners. After 1938, it also served as the administrative headquarters for Germany’s entire concentration camp system.
Larry and I entered the triangular roll-call area, where prisoners were sometimes forced to stand at attention for hours and hours, often in extreme weather conditions, as punishment for non-existent crimes. We visited Barracks 38 and 39, which once housed hundreds of Jews, in overcrowded, disease-ridden and dismal conditions.
We also saw “Station Z,” the crematorium and extermination site, and the infirmary barracks, where medical experiments as well as selections for mass executions took place.
During the entire visit to Sachsenhausen, under incongruously sunny skies, I felt that I was walking in a surreal dream, a twisted and demonic episode of “The Twilight Zone.” The overpowering heaviness in my chest made it difficult to breathe. And I swore I could still smell the stench of death.
“How was Germany?” “Did you visit the concentration camp?” Our four sons fired questions at us upon our return.
“How do we explain the unexplainable?” I asked my husband. How do I describe the haunting and terrifying sensation, on the drive from Berlin to Sachsenhausen, of seeing chimneys and train tracks and desolate farm houses? How do I tell my children that while gazing out the car window at the dense forests, I was looking at the invisible specters of Jews on death marches and Jews in hiding?
I can only vow to respond to their questions, as my mother responded to mine, and to engage in this other and the more difficult “facts of life” discussion.
We will read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and see “Schindler’s List.” We will visit the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and Yad Vashem in Israel. And we will weep inconsolably at the sight of a solitary pair of white leather baby shoes, alone in a plexiglass display case. This, for me, was the most poignant and heart-wrenching symbol of the Holocaust’s devastation.
This year, on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on April 23, Larry and I will especially remember the almost 100,000 Jews who perished at Sachsenhausen as well as the remaining 6 million Jews who died.
Together with our four sons, we will light the yellow yahrzeit candle on Wednesday evening, April 22, the 27th day of Nisan on the Jewish calendar. We will say a prayer, vowing “never to forget the lives of the Jewish men, women and children who are symbolized by this flame.”
As Jews, we are commanded to remember all those who have died. But for victims of the Holocaust, remembering them and honoring them is not enough; we must also take action so that their lives — ordinary and extraordinary, long and brutally short-lived — will not have been in vain.
For us, this action consists of enthusiastically reaffirming our commitment to Judaism. We send our sons to Jewish day school and to Jewish summer camps. We joyously celebrate brises, Bar Mitzvahs and other life-cycle events. We gather together with aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents to celebrate the Jewish holidays.
This October we have even promised to build our first sukkah.
Equally as important, we teach our children tolerance and respect for other people. We don’t allow ethnic jokes, scapegoating or bolstering our own egos by putting down others. But we do permit fighting back, when it’s appropriate and warranted, and we remember the heroic resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
My husband and I agree that we want to raise proud Jewish sons, secure and content in their faith. We want them to continue to carry the banner of Judaism, which has survived many brutal and terrifying attacks during its 5,000-plus years of history.
But we must also remember that eight days after Yom Hashoah comes Yom Ha’atzmaut, the anniversary of the creation of Israel. We must remember that out of ruination comes renewal.
As it says in Ecclesiastes 3:4, there is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
