2/2/2004 09:41:19 PM|||Jesus|||Holocaust Memorial Day

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I stopped over in Poland, where three of my grandparents were born. On my first day in Warsaw, I met an elderly Polish-Israeli couple on their first visit to Poland since the war. They were not lucky enough to emmigrate in the early 1930s to Israel . They survived the Holocaust � he in the concentration camps, she disguised as a non-Jew, always on the run. After the war they moved to Israel, and when the gates to East Europe re-opened to Israelis, they decided to revisit their past.



Our first meeting was short and polite: a hello between Israelis bumping into each other abroad. A week later, I saw them again, in Auschwitz. They were about to go to the block where he had once lived, and invited me to join them. It was springtime, a slightly warm, cloudless, day. But as soon as we walked into Birkenau, Auschwitz's second camp, a winter's chill seemed to fall over us. The old man, a fluent Hebrew speaker, switched suddenly to Polish. He changed from a gentle, quiet, smiling and easy-going Israeli, into a somber, stiff, stranger. He started talking, very fast, and his wife translated. Here was a sign painted by a friend of his. There was the path they walked every morning to their slave labour. Here was the block in which he saw, briefly and for a last time, another friend. He did not speak of gas chambers or of the crematoriums, both only few hundred meters away, nor of the horrifying piles of shoes and hair of the victims, set silently in a block that had been turned into a museum.



He was not speaking of his memories: he was living them again. And we, not being able to reach him nor to support him, could just stand there and listen.





My visit to Auschwitz was a reminder that the Holocaust accompanies all Israelis, all the time. Each year, in the spring, we have Memorial Holocaust Day. The date, the 27th of the Jewish month Nissan, commemorates the day in which the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto begun: April 19, 1943.



But the Holocaust lives not just in one anniversary. It's also the details of our daily lives: the tattooed number on the arm of the old lady sitting next to you on the bus, the missing relatives at family gatherings, the photos in albums, of people it's too hard for your grandfather to talk about. And, although this is sometimes difficult to admit, it's a subtext in most of our discussions about politics or about our identities as Jews and as Israelis. The memory of the Holocaust is there, always. Whatever your political opinions are, an existential anxiety lies, unsaid, in the basis of your arguments. There's nothing comparable to it(the Holocaust), but every exploding bus, every anti-Semitic comment awakens this fear. Europe's Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27 � the date on which the Red Army liberated Auschwitz � is of no less importance than Israel's Holocaust memorial day � especially in these times of rising anti-semitism.



We might never understand enough about the Holocaust to be prepared for a meeting with a survivor of Auschwitz. But the least that can be done, is to commemorate this remembrance. It will always be there. As the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote: "Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light/ in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day/But then it is the light that makes you remember."

MICHAL LEVERTOV

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