Yom HaShoah Reflection at the Rock, Northwestern University

Remarks for Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 8, 2013

I am not a Holocaust survivor, let alone even the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. 

Though I have experienced painful, even horrific loss, my personal loss is not connected (at least not directly) to the systematic extermination of millions of Jews and millions of others by the Nazi regime 70 years ago.

Still, as a caring, thinking human being, and as a committed Jew, I have felt a connection to the devastation of the Shoah since I was a little boy.

But until two months ago, I had never set foot in Poland, site of the largest Nazi death camps.  I went in the cold and gray month of February as part of a group of 50 men from the Chicago Jewish community on a weeklong educational tour.  Touring the Polish cities of Krakow, Lublin, Warsaw, our days followed a somewhat regular cycle.  In the morning we would visit the empty remnants of what had been thousand-year-old Jewish communities, and then in the afternoon we would tour the nearby sites where the people from those communities and thousands of others were murdered – Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, the Warsaw Ghetto. 

At Auschwitz, we walked through a barrack that now displays relics from the Holocaust.  In one room, an entire wall contained stacks and stacks of human hair, shorn from prisoners and ready to be converted into rope.  At Majdanek, we entered a barrack that is now a ghostly consignment area for thousands and thousands of shoes. If you have visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or Yad Vashem, you may have seen exhibits of shoes and hair, on “loan” from the camps and used to illustrate the depravity of the Nazi Final Solution.

Though these displays were viscerally jarring and are seared into my memory, I find my thoughts cycling back to an empty place. 

At Majdanek, we walked through a building that housed a gas chamber where prisoners, freshly arrived from transports, were sent for immediate extermination.  The chamber is there, intact, a concrete room with a low ceiling, a ceiling streaked blue by the stains of Zyklon B, the gas used in these halls of murder.  A ridge around the doorframe of the gas chamber is now a reminder of a special seal once imported from Berlin, where the brightest engineering and scientific minds of the Nazi regime had been working not to cure disease or alleviate suffering, but rather to ensure the maximum lethality of these gas chambers.  Near the entrance was the post where two Nazi guards would watch men and women and children being suffocated, making sure that no one survived each time the door was sealed.

I stood just outside the chamber, peering into that dark, dark place, and closed my eyes, both afraid and compelled to imagine the horror that extinguished infinitely precious human life in this place.  I felt—or imagined—hands reaching out from the darkness, saw—or imagined—mouths twisted into a silent but pressing plea, asking “Why” and demanding of us, these later generations: “Do not forget”.

I am not the grandchild of Holocaust survivors.  But my wife Claire is, and our two-year-old son Jacob is the great-grandchild of Holocaust survivors. 

So, now that I am home, I ask: how do I help ensure that Jacob is safe from ever experiencing such horror?  How do I help him understand that even “normal” everyday people can be caught up in an orgy of evil and dehumanization?

How do I answer why? 

And how do I make sure that we never, ever forget?