Israel, Day 6

Shalom, Yerushalayim! The bus was full of people and bags and set to go to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The bags were packed for two days in the Negev desert. Dan, Matan, Avichai, and I loaded the bus with everyone’s luggage. Somehow we filled it with a lot of extra space; previously it seemed stuffed to the brim. Our astonishment grew when we realized that the bags should be fuller this time around, having stopped at two markets in Jerusalem where people bought gifts and souvenirs. We looked at one another and shrugged, deciding to simply be grateful for this blessing rather than look a gift-bus in the mouth, and boarded.

The drive wasn’t too long. Before I knew it we were at Yad Vashem. “This is dhe Holocaust Memorial, everyone. Please follow me to dhe inside and we will begin our tour first with a short presentation.” Ran led the way. “Yalla, yalla.” Let’s go.

We were seated in a dark auditorium. The room was large enough to accommodate 150 to 200 people, and the chairs were arranged lecture-hall style into three columns with two aisles that drew toward the center where the stage was. As I was at the head of the line, I filed in to the first seat in the front row.

An elderly, frail woman appeared on the stage. Her hair was the color of snow on a cloudy day, and her eyes bespoke experience, weariness, and gratitude. This was a Holocaust survivor.

“I lived in Lithuania, which is in Eastern Europe. Back then there were two hundred thousand Jews living in Lithuania. We were autonomous, self-sufficient. We had our own schools, four in Hebrew, one in Yiddish. We spoke mostly Hebrew. My father owned a factory.

“In 1939, Hitler and Stalin divided up the countries between them, including Lithuania. Originally, when the Red Army took over, they wanted the Jews in Lithuania to love them. There were many of us. They played accordion in the streets, and did all sorts of little things to try to seem better.

“They took over the whole place, soon. The streets, the shops. They took over my father’s factory and gave him a job there. That was lucky; not everyone got so much as a job.”

Gradually, many of the things they loved were outlawed, even including the Hebrew language. They weren’t to practice their religion outright, they weren’t to assemble publicly. It was dangerous to do these things and be caught.

“The youth, we organized an underground with one of our teachers, Professor Dobleveen. Dobleveen opened his home to us, his old students, and we would meet there in secret to sing forbidden songs in Hebrew. Just to sing and to keep our culture. It was not safe.”

The room was in awe by now. A few minutes before, we were complacent, watching but somewhat uncomfortable in our chairs. Some people were even tired and drifting off in the beginning. But by the time she said, “The Lithuanians were even against us; they said they should kill the Jews and take our property before the Germans can,” the whole audience was rapt. When she got to her own personal story from the ghettos, of being separated from her family, of being terrified watching the Nazis do unspeakable things to helpless people, of seeing tanks roll in and being scared to death, of finally being rescued by the British, of being one of the very, very few lucky ones who survived, I had to stop writing. I could no longer focus on my notebook; I was locked into her story.

“So that was my story. Thank you for listening,” she said. We thanked her, as well, and walked out of the auditorium, back into the harsh light and heat.

Our guide led us to the entrance of the actual memorial museum, the exhibition building. It was, like most of the buildings in Israel, a large stone construct. This one seemed immense, though, set on a mountain, overlooking a vast green view.

On our approach to the building, I wrote these words, which really informed the way I felt about the visit as we walked through the memorial: To gather meaning from the chaos of the Holocaust, we must delve beyond statistics and documents, and address it from a human, subjective perspective.

I paid close attention to perspective and building design as we approached and walked through the museum. I’m intrigued by spaces and how we use them in structures; to create spatial illusions and mental divisions, to influence ideas, to direct people.

Yad Vashem was designed to do all of that to its visitors. There are no windows inside. The space is capacious, with big, stone, prison walls that seem forty feet high. When I walked in, I had the overwhelming feeling of being funneled into a place. As I entered a banister blocked my way, forcing me to my left. It cut the space perpendicularly, but there was also a feel of the room growing smaller that wouldn’t go away. I quickly discovered that the space was growing smaller; the extraordinarily high hallway walls were angled for that purpose, inward as they went up, like an “A”.

The first exhibit, a huge overhead projection on the wall near the ceiling, forced us to crowd around each other and crane our necks to see images of Jews across Europe as they had been before the war: happy, sad, busy, contented, living out their lives. Normal. To see the rest of the exhibits, to continue on our path, we had to physically turn around and walk away from those people. Down that hallway, with the exhibit rooms on either side, the walls started to close in.

The exhibits followed a chronological sequence, starting with the earlier events of World War II, through the work camps, the dehumanization, the concentration camps, the systematic composition of mass graves for firing squad victims, leading up to the very end: the gas chambers and the aftermath.

It was hard. I think it was hard on everyone there; nobody enjoyed being there, but everyone felt it was important. I saw a video of a survivor telling her story of being the only one left alive in a mass grave. She slipped and fell in. She might have been clipped by the shot but she wasn’t killed. She had to claw her way out from amongst the bodies of people she knew and plenty she didn’t know, having played dead for who knew how long. Imagining that kind of human cruelty – the things she went through and the things she saw others go through – I felt a surge of anger, fear, confusion, sadness, and indignation. I looked around and saw one of my friends silently crying nearby, the look on his face that I felt in my heart, and I put a hand on his shoulder. He gave me a grim smile of recognition, and I thought back to the previous day’s prep talk. “How could someone really believe that this didn’t happen? How could they pretend it was a hoax?” someone had asked. This is how, I thought now. They can’t accept that people could commit such atrocities, and if they can forget about it, they’d like to. It’s easier than the truth. It’s easier than taking responsibility for history.

We approached the exit. I could see the light outside the memorial as we walked into the last room of Yad Vashem.

I shed a tear or two, and I was deeply upset by the emotions brought up seeing so much human suffering so close, so easy to grasp, but I made it through much of the memorial, and I was proud of myself for mostly holding it together.

Then I realized what the last room was. The Hall of Names.

I had read about the Hall of Names. I had originally heard of it in college, when I was reading Maus, by Art Spiegelman, for the first time for a class. Writing about Spiegelman’s use of comics to portray his father’s troubled present, wrapped up in a horrible history, I said, “We cannot… do perfect justice to everything that has been lost. But we can… prove our humanity.” We can do so by remembering and honoring everything that has been found.

The Hall of Names contains all Holocaust victims’ names and biographical statements that have been recovered. There are some two million pages lining the round walls now, but there is room for four million more. This, alone, could be enough to cut at your heartstrings.

The Hall of Names is a round room with a conical ceiling that slopes inward as it rises. It is essentially a round hallway, rather than a full room, because of its center: marking a circle concentric with the larger room, a large space is blocked off by a chest-high glass wall topped with a banister.

Visible over the banister and beneath floor-level is a pool reflecting the cone-shaped ceiling. This much I knew, and I knew what was reflected in that pool, from my studies. What I didn’t know was how it would make me feel to be in that room, to look up at that ceiling.

On the ceiling – what I first noticed when I walked in the room, and what I could hardly tear my eyes from for the time that I was in there – are six hundred photographs of Holocaust victims. These people smiling or posing or simply looking out at you from their pictures were all systematically and brutally removed from this world because they existed. Their lives were cut short and for many of them, all that’s left to remember them by is the name and the picture in this Hall.

I had studied all of this, I knew what happened in the Holocaust, I knew how it affected people involved – hell, I even knew how it affected those not directly involved. I read about postmemory and the lasting generational effects of the Holocaust on victims’ and survivors’ relatives. But it was not the same as being in the memorial, in the Hall of Names, and feeling through the photographs and the videos and the architecture of this place a connection to them and emotions directly related to what they went through.

For a moment, I wanted to get out. I felt tears well up in my eyes and I tried to take my eyes from the photos, tried to remove my mind from the situation like a coward and stop crying before it could start, tried to move to the banister and lean over and not see. Instead, I saw the binders on the walls. The countless binders filled with names and biographies, and the innumerable spaces left in those walls for more pages, representing people who didn’t even have their pictures or names in this Hall for remembrance. I lost it. I sat down, leaned against the back wall of the hall, and I cried.

Someone touched me on the shoulder and I realized the group had mostly left. I caught up with the last few people as they left the Hall of Names and followed them out into the harsh, jarring sunlight.

I don’t know how many other members of our group felt what I felt, but as I walked out of that room I know at least a couple of them seemed even more shaken by that than by the rest of the museum. There were some pretty shocking exhibits in there – a piece of an actual train that carted victims to a concentration camp, a complete scale-model of a gas chamber undressing area, videos recorded of survivors’ horror stories – but the sheer size of this atrocity can have a profound effect on people, and I think it should.

We gathered around the exit area outside the museum itself for a quick lunch, during which we could make purchases in the nearby gift shop. The only thing I bought there was a pin that came with a donation to the memorial. There were some interesting books I saw, but I didn’t feel like lugging them back to America with me along with everything else I was carrying. I could probably find them online or in any other bookstore, anyway.

Our next stop was Har Herzl, the military cemetery. Har Herzl, or Mount Herzl, is also the site of the memorial cemetery on Holocaust Memorial Day. Herzl himself is buried at the top of the hill because of his place as the visionary of the State of Israel.

The cemetery manages to be both reverent and modest. It’s surrounded by trees and grass and the place has an air of serenity. We saw the gravesites of Theodor Herzl, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and countless Israeli soldiers. There is a special site dedicated to the paratroopers from what was then British-controlled Palestine who dropped behind enemy lines to help rescue Jews in Europe during the Holocaust. Of those who entered Hungary, many were captured; seven were killed. They are buried at this site on Har Herzl.

A national military cemetery is different from a civilian one because of the focus placed on purpose – people buried in one all died acting with protection in their hearts, in service of many people they would never meet. It’s also different because of its sheer size. There are rows upon rows of carefully maintained graves and headstones, with rocks placed above them in honor and memory of the deceased. It made me think of how many people could be killed in service and not found, not placed in the ground with carefully maintained graves and memorial rocks in a place of public recognition.

We read a short memorial service for these soldiers of Israel, these protectors of a place we could call home if we choose to, and we did so with care and with gratitude. This program, Taglit-Birthright Israel, is an extraordinary one. In a few short days we bonded with each other, with our culture, and connected with a country in a way that could easily take months or may not even be possible in other places. When we saw the gravesite of Michael Levin, a former Taglit-Birthright participant who was so moved by this place and these people that he came back and joined the Israeli Defense Forces; so moved that he left his home in the United States when he was there on leave to visit family because he needed to come back to Israel and help defend it in 2006; so moved that he insisted he be allowed into combat upon returning in spite of being originally given a nonviolent assignment, and was the only American Israeli soldier killed in the Second Lebanon War. This is the strongest example of the fullest potential extent of such a connection, but it’s a poignant one, and it made our little memorial service even more heartfelt.

I left Har Herzl feeling the weight of the entire day, but we were only halfway done. It was probably about 3:30, maybe 4:00PM and time for our bus ride to the desert, which for me was to be time for two things: quiet reflection and helping Jesse write her speech for her upcoming Bat Mitzvah ceremony.

I spent some time with my eyes closed appreciating the gravity of our last two visits, coming to terms with the fact that we were, on the same day as our visit to Yad Vashem and Har Herzl, going to hang out in the desert and enjoy a Bedouin feast, probably with some partying afterward. How could we do it? How could we possibly go from remembering the incalculable number of victims of the Holocaust, trying to understand them mentally and emotionally, honoring the dead of both that era of anti-Semitic destruction and survival and this era of homeland and hope, to chillin’ out in the Negev with our homies?

My eyes stayed closed as the first few lines spilled out, but with a little time, my pen began to answer me.

From desperate pain that reminds us of the desert; dry hurt that, in spurts, draws precious water from a tap that we can’t cap in our eyes; we rise.

From detection, deception, rejection, orchestrated interception, ejection, an interconnection of terrible lies sold to us like fresh pies through clenched teeth and disguises, we rise.

From a chaos haphazardly scattered that tatters us, shatters us, splatters us, stealing what matters down to drowning the sounds of our cries, we rise.

From a grief that continues its sinuous track into every crack; through fractured packs, over boats, into shacks, into ghettos so stacked with defeat that their children’s children are wracked with the memory like bricks on their backs; from every whack on our strength, each attack on our hope, it must be our knack, because we don’t lose our closeness despite all this flak; we rise.

Together, we rise.

As sure as the stars, sometimes masked by the clouds or the lights kept so loud, ever quietly proud, perhaps it’s a phoenix-down shroud draped around our collective shoulders, for as the world learns every year it gets older, we rise.

The ancestors, the forefathers, the men, the women, their children who passed before us and whom we remembered today would not be burdened by the quickness of our transition from remembrance to enjoyment, so long as we understood that it has a purpose. Our people would want us to live on and cherish our traditions and our connections that they would never see, as long as we did remember, first.

So then Jesse came over and sat next to me. The background on this goes thusly: Tair told the group we would have a small Bar/Bat Mitzvah ceremony. Anyone who wanted to could participate; how cool would that be, having a Bar Mitzvah ceremony in Israel? It wasn’t super-official, or anything. The participants would need to learn the blessing before and after the torah reading and write a small speech to give the group before the torah portion was read. They were practicing in groups of two and three but writing their speeches individually. I offered to help anyone who wanted help with the speech-writing part, since I have a bit of a background in public speaking and writing.

I never offered to write speeches for anyone, and I think I made it fairly clear that I’m a teacher, so those who wanted my help in the form of direct answers should prepare themselves for frustration; we lovers of education tend to answer many questions with more questions when exploring personal writing.

We worked on Jesse’s speech for about half the trip to the desert and at our half-way restroom stop she asked me to read it again. I promised her for the four-thousandth time that it really, truly was excellent. I wouldn’t lie to her. I told her when things didn’t sound right. So this time I told her to read it and listen to herself. I expected her to ask me again if I thought it was okay, but number four thousand and one didn’t happen because Erika called me up to the front of the bus to give her a hand with her speech.

I left Jesse to Robby’s assistance – he writes and loves to argue, and was therefore more than willing to help prove to her that her speech sounded excellent.

An argument was occurring at the front of the bus. Tair and Ran were trying to explain something that seemed, to me, fairly obvious to a scattered group of World Cup enthusiasts.

“Come on, there’s got to be some way we can at least keep up with the final match. A portable T.V., even?”

“No, I’m sorry. We will be in the desert. There’s not much in the way of television there, you know.”

“How about a radio? Anyone have a radio?”

“I don’t think so. Look, we’ll see if there’s anything we can do but I can’t promise you anything. This trip is about Israel, not the World Cup.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” came the murmured response of a few.

Hey, I love soccer too, but I had resigned myself to the fact that I could miss a once-in-four-years soccer match on television for a once-in-a-lifetime experience hanging out in the Israeli Negev desert with a bunch of really cool people.

I went back to helping Erika write her speech. When the bus finally arrived at the Bedouin tent, I felt my two friends were definitely prepared to give stellar Bat Mitzvah speeches when the time would come the following night.

We were seated in a not-circle inside the large tent. It was big enough to accommodate all of us; we would be sleeping in the tent together that night, so having nearly fifty people sitting around the perimeter wasn’t too big a deal. The desert was sandy, like a desert should be, so mats covered the floor of the tent. One of our hosts greeted us and sat at the front of the tent, his back to the sunlight pouring in from the open side.

He explained that Bedouins live on goats and camels. There isn’t a lot of water in the desert – shocker, right? Normally they travel so the goats and camels can have food and water. They set up tents for sleeping and long term stays. Tents are good, especially for winter, when more rainfall occurs. The holes in the tent close up and keep water out during rain.

“I have 40 camels, but they not for tourist. I no like tourist riding my camels. It not good for them,” he said.

Life in the desert is interesting to outsiders. It can take seven days to get from one tribe to another on foot in the desert, so travelers often have to make stops. “Desert law says you must invite guests. None of this, ‘Why you not call me first?’” So they invite guests in, feed them, and allow them to stay and rest. They even reserve their coffee for use with guests.

When a guest arrives, they will kill a goat and make dinner before asking the guest, loudly enough for the wife to hear, “Where will you go tomorrow?” That way she makes food enough to saddle the guest’s camel for however many days he will travel, depending on where he is going.

Today, though, the Bedouins stay in one place and aren’t allowed to travel if they wish to be citizens of Israel. It’s hard to be a citizen without a place.

“We don’t use money, either. You use money, go crazy. No money, no lies.” This Bedouin man was a man of wisdom. He also informed us that they don’t have trash in the desert. They use everything. “Absolutely ecological life,” he said.

We thought we were absorbed when he explained desert life to us; not quite. His friend came out and brought with him an instrument that looked like a box-shaped harp. Cooool.

He started to play and we all clapped along. It was fun music, for a single instrument. Then he showed Ian how to hold it and Ian played it for a bit.

After the short musical show it was time for dinner, but first, our host said, your leader has an announcement.

“You will be feasting in dhe tent over there,” Ran said, pointing outside to a nearby tent, “and then you will be free to enjoy dhe desert a little bit. We will have a bonfire over there, and there are other groups around here for you to interact with them. Also,” he continued, “we have a… surprise.”

Tair stood up. “For anyone who wants to watch the World Cup finals, there will be a large screen projection over there later on.” She pointed in the direction opposite the tent in which dinner would be. “Don’t ask how we managed to get that set up.”

There were cheers. There was applause. There was talk of trying to get Ran drunk tonight – obviously, that would never happen, but it was a very funny thought. And then there was food.

They served us in groups of five. We sat around a frame close to the floor onto which a large tray of food was placed. There were humungous tortillas, tahini, rice, grilled meat, vegetables, olives, and hummus. It was all communal; we took what we wanted to eat as we ate it. It came to mind that if we did that more often in America we could save a substantial amount of cleanup work at mealtime.

It was also all extraordinarily tasty. Frankly, when you’re hungry and in the desert, most food will be extraordinarily tasty, but this truly was a good meal. We had a good time sitting around the table and chatting while we ate.

The party started after dinner was finished. The bonfire was lit and the game came on the screen across the sand. Watching World Cup soccer in the teachers’ lounge at work was cool. Watching soccer in a hotel room in Tel Aviv was cooler. But when somebody asks me if I saw Spain win the World Cup in 2010, I am one of several people who will thoroughly enjoy, probably more than we should, responding, “I watched the final match in the DESERT. In ISRAEL.”

We all hung out until the wee hours of the morning, sometimes dancing to music or chatting around the bonfire, sometimes playing card games in the tent. At one point I found myself talking about ethnicity with Joel and Jesse.

“I’m Russian and English,” I said, “which is probably why I’m still not tanning, even in this desert.”

We laughed. “I think I’m Polish and Russian,” Jesse said, “and… Jewish, obviously.”

“Well, yeah,” I agreed.

“I’m Pittsburghian,” added Joel.

Jesse and I looked at him in incredulous silence.

Suddenly, kindhearted, laid-back, completely chill Jesse burst out of character and started haranguing him, her outstretched finger thrusting at his chest. “What the hell is Pittsburghian?! Are you even Jewish? What are you doing here?!”

At first, both Joel and I were confounded. A second later, the three of us exploded into laughter.

A short while later we rejoined the bonfire group. We were relaxing, talking, and enjoying the naturally uniting warmth of a low fire when Alan and Jeff came spilling through the crowd and next to the fire with a wheelbarrow.

“Hang on! Look out! We have to… ungh…” they grunted, hefting two large flaming logs onto the dwindling flame in the pit. “Hey, hey! We are victorious!” The pair high-fived and cheered while the rest of the group sat gaping at them. A few scattered chuckles swam through the crowd.

“Did… those two just pull a Lord of the Flies and steal fire from another group?” I asked.

Jesse just nodded slowly, her eyes still fixed on the wheelbarrow. “Maybe we should move this seat back,” she suggested, motioning toward the bench on which we sat.

Standing up, I quickly agreed. “Good idea.”

The rest of the night passed similarly, with goofy hijinks and fun conversations with fantastic friends. I walked around exploring the desert a bit with Danielle, since it was even cooler at night – both visually and in temperature – and then came back to the tent. I lay down on the sleeping bag. The second my head came in contact with my outstretched arm, I was out for the remainder of the night.