Hello friends,
Just before my eighteenth birthday, I went on a trip called March of the Living. It’s a two-week trip to Poland and Israel, where participants learn about the Holocaust and the nation we built afterward as a refuge. In Poland, we visited the sites of ghettos and destroyed Jewish towns. We saw mass graves and concentration camps and heard firsthand accounts from survivors. They came back to the places where Nazis tried to destroy them so they could ensure the next generations knew what happened there and would never let it happen again.
That week in Poland was filled with many moments of sorrow and rage, but the worst for me was seeing Majdanek. The Soviet army advanced quickly in 1944 and captured the concentration camp before the SS could destroy the infrastructure and hide their war crimes. I saw so many horrible things there, but two images are seared in my mind to this day. One was a barrack filled with shoes. Hundreds of shoes piled all the way to the ceiling in a mass of mud-caked loss. The shoes were as dusty and dirty as when they were initially taken from the victims, but one single shoe stood out. It was bright red, and it was small. One child’s tiny red shoe screamed against the indeterminate brown pile. I couldn’t handle the sight of that shoe. I left the barrack, sat down on the grass, and cried. My friends sat with me, and we cried together until we could gather ourselves enough to keep going.
The other image from that day that will never leave me is the Mausoleum. In 1969, the Mausoleum was erected as a monument to the victims. A large dome inscribed with the Polish words “Let our fate be a warning to you” sits above an urn. I didn’t realize it was an urn until I walked up the steps and saw a giant mound of ash. The ashes were all that remained of the tens of thousands who were murdered there. I stood on the edge of that urn, and I sobbed. All around me, others did the same—the raw sounds of weeping reverberated under the Mausoleum’s dome. Many of the people with me that day were seeing the final resting place of their family members.
I never thought I would see something like that again. For nearly eighty years, we said, “Never again.” And then the October 7th massacres happened. Only this time, I didn’t see shoes and ash. I saw couples dead in each other’s arms. I saw women raped. I saw children and elderly people kidnapped. I saw dead babies. I saw the same hate that has existed for 3,000 years rear its ugly head in a way I could not have imagined.
I’ve struggled with this essay because none of the words seem right. No words can fully capture the devastation, sorrow, and rage. All I can say is that I’m Jewish, and my heart is broken. It breaks for the thousands of Jews who were murdered and kidnapped. It breaks for the Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze who were also murdered in cold blood or gave their lives to save their Israeli brothers and sisters. It breaks for the citizens of more than forty countries who were killed or abducted. And it breaks for the people of Gaza, whom Hamas sacrifices in its attempt to wipe Israel off the map.
Nobody wins in a war. We only try to survive and pick up the pieces afterward.
Until next time,
Yardena
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