Lesson of Yad Vashem: Israel was our reward
A page from the Auschwitz album on show at the Yad Veshem museum. Its caption is ‘Veteran inmates load the belongings of new arrivals onto trucks. Birkenau functioned as a massive killing and plundering facility during the period that the Hungarian Jews were sent there.’
Lesson of the holocaust exhibition: Israel is our reward
This comment on Robert Cohen’s Auschwitz Revisited (Is there any meaning to be found in Auschwitz?) was sent to Robert who posted it below his own column. We repost it here as a comment in its own right. Robert says you can find out more about ny friend Mark Braverman, author of Fatal Embrace, here
Mark Braverman, Micah’s Paradigm Shift
January 31, 2014
Robert, thank you, once again for your reflections, which, once again, match my sensibilities and experience so closely. Here is a passage from my book, Fatal Embrace, in which I recount my visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, ten years ago:
It’s a brilliant exhibition. One walks down, into it. It is subterranean—
no windows, no light, no escape. You are led through
corridors and tunnels, with no control and no way out but through.
One traverses the whole, familiar story: from the laws enacted in
the thirties, the walls of isolation, privation, and degradation closing
in, to the Final Solution: the ovens, the stacked bodies, the faces
of the children. Darkness closes your heart—you feel you will never
escape from this horror, this black hole of evil and despair. Then,
turning a corner into the final gallery, on display are the blown-up
photos of the ships bringing the refugees to the shores of Israel,
faces shining with hope and gratitude. There is David Ben-Gurion
reading from the Israeli Declaration of Independence. And then,
suddenly, you emerge. Ascending a wide flight of stairs, you are
outside, in the light and the open air, standing on a wide patio that
looks out on the Jerusalem Hills. It’s the final exhibit. And then it hit
me. This was no mere museum. This was a lesson; this was indoctrination:
from the biblical quote at the entrance, into the depths, and
to this sight—The Land. The reward. Our destiny.
The fifty-eight-year spell was broken. I got it. And something
let go, and it was okay.
Diane, a fellow delegate, turned to me as we walked out
and asked if I had seen the part about how the Nazis acted to
marginalize, dispossess, and banish the Jews, the part before the
extermination camps and the ovens. She asked if I had seen that
this was what we had witnessed over the last few days. Yes, I had
seen. The spell was broken. I got it. And it was okay.
Treading, as I had so many times, the sacred ground of the
Holocaust, I had, for the first time, broken the Rule: our Holocaust,
the Holocaust, must not be compared to any other disaster,
genocide, or crime. It has to stand as the ultimate humanitarian
crime, the genocide. Not only that, I had also broken a rule so
fundamental, so important that it is never even spoken: I had
compared the Jews to the Nazis. And it was okay. Because, for the
first time, I knew what I had to do; I knew how to understand and
integrate the Holocaust. For one thing had not changed: the Nazi
Holocaust would continue to be the formative historical event of
my life. But now, from this day forward, finding the meaning of
the Holocaust meant working for justice for Palestine. There were
too many parallels, too many ways in which Israel was doing to
the Palestinians what the Nazis did to us. No, we had not built
death camps. But we were turning into beasts, into persecutors,
and we were killing a civilization.
Here was the most terrible irony in this scenario: in enshrining
our own memory, in living out our liturgy of destruction, to use
theologian Marc Ellis’s phrase, we have been erasing the history of
another. It is a terrible irony that Yad Vashem, along with Har Herzl,
is built on top of these hills west of Jerusalem, hills littered with the
remains of Palestinian villages. Some have been turned into parks
for the Jews of Jerusalem. Most are ruins, stones bleaching in the
sun, standing guard over uncultivated terraces of olives and grapes,
witnesses to shattered lives and a murdered civilization.
Mark Braverman
Executive Director, Kairos USA