When I was 17, a mere seven years ago that feel like a lifetime, I joined my school’s heritage trip to Poland. I spent hours in the weeks leading up to the flight trying to get my grandfather’s blessing. As a child of Holocaust survivors, he couldn’t understand why I would want to go. After all, I grew up under a shadow cast by the Holocaust, albeit distant, with half of my great-grandparents having survived concentration camps and another quarter having escaped Europe in the mid to late 30s. Some of them I was lucky enough to know.

Even with no discussion of the Holocaust immediately around me as a child, I had the occasional nightmares about Nazis like many of my peers, played games centered around escaping the Nazis, and silently noticed the numbers on my great-grandparents’ arms. My Holocaust education began long before I picked up Elie Weisel’s Night at age ten. It was intrinsic to my world.

Visiting destroyed communities and concentration camps, I explained to my grandfather, is like visiting a loved one’s grave. So many Jews had no proper Jewish burial, and I felt that this is a way that I can honor them. I wanted to go to whatever graves from before the Holocaust that remained standing, too. I also wanted to bear witness in the most thorough way that I could. I wasn’t naïve, and I understood the cynicism surrounding “Holocaust tourism” and the controversial industry centered around profiting off of relics of dead Jews’ obliterated communities. Seeing it firsthand was deeply unsettling.

Already back then, Holocaust universalization was underway outside of the Jewish bubbles I frequented. Today, only some seven years later, universalization has given way to inversion, with a concerted, active, and well-funded effort to paint a narrative of victims as perpetrators, leading to demonization of Israel, increased permissiveness to antisemitism, amplification of Holocaust denial, and cheapening the memory of the Holocaust and even the term genocide itself.

Since October 7th, I’ve often thought back to the world of the 1990s that I never knew, my parents’ high school days and arguably the peak of the golden age of American Jewry. I found a book in my great-grandparents’ house from that decade that happily announced the death of antisemitism in America, never to return. Of course, no one could have predicted the 2001 introduction of Qatari money to U.S. institutions that was soon to follow, along with the age of social media handing the reins of public influence to just about anyone with enough money or charisma.

I’ll share here, in honor of Yom HaShoah, what I wrote upon returning from my profoundly meaningful trip back in an ever so slightly more innocent pre-October 7th world. But first, I’ll share a few snapshots that weren’t included, a testament to an already indifferent world on the brink of an antisemitic spiral: Graffiti on walls in concentration camps. European schoolchildren laughing and teasing each other on the grounds of Auschwitz, right in front of our delegation full of descendants of survivors. Looking around a neighborhood that had once been a shtetl, with some of the original buildings still standing, full of residents but empty of Jews, after the entire community was murdered. My sister also recalls passing by a bar on her trip, in which parts of the Kaddish prayer were visible on the walls, because this bar was once a synagogue whose congregation was murdered.

Sometimes there was blatant antisemitism, people who noticed that real live Jews had the audacity to walk among them: the man who made faces at us, or the couple who abusively screamed antisemitic slurs at my sister’s class and told them to go “back to Auschwitz”. Save for a few Jews tending to synagogues or trying to bravely make a statement with their presence, Poland felt Judenrein. You were supposed to use your imagination to see the invisible throngs of Hasidic Jews, now ghosts passing by shops featuring little wooden Jewish men holding bags of money or menorahs. Hitler, some theorized, had planned to make a museum exhibit of the extinct Jewish race.

I remember discussing my trip with a family friend later that year, who described his experience on a heritage trip as feeling as if he were visiting that exhibit live. The only comfort was, and remains, our Israeli flags- which had to be hidden outside the defunct electric fences of Auschwitz.

I got back from Poland yesterday morning. 

It’s strange- while last week seemed to be the longest of my life, it also passed in the blink of an eye. I still feel like I’m standing in Birkenau, sitting in Auschwitz, kneeling in the forests draped in the mourning of murders long since committed, still hearing the echoes of the terror of the last moments of life spent in those shadows.

The numbness I felt in Majdanek, the tears that overwhelmed me in the children’s forest, the awe in the scarce remains of the shtetls, the nausea in Auschwitz, and the brokenhearted resolve in Birkenau have left my mind and my senses reeling. I can hardly focus through all of the jumbled emotions and confusion that come with a million thoughts a second.

Just over sixty names of my relatives are all I managed to find. There had to have been at least one hundred and fifty to five hundred in total, very roughly. I compiled them onto a single list which I read in Auschwitz. The weight of more than sixty kdoshim in my pocket was palpable as I trudged through the ruins of the hell on earth many of them lost their lives to. I couldn’t visit Sobibor or what was the Riga Ghetto, or Theresienstadt, which were the sites of most of their murders.

The names I did have, I carried with me. Yesterday, I put them into the kotel as their final resting place. They could themselves have only dreamed of seeing Yerushalayim one day.

And what about all of the names that I don’t have? All of the people who disappeared without leaving a trace, all of the families and communities? Their lives, their minds, their stories, were reduced to ash, their sparks dying slowly as the winds carried them away, along with their names, leaving no remnant of their existences.

If saving one life is akin to saving the world entire, what is the murder of millions? The destruction and the suffering is far beyond the capacity of human comprehension. If every person has potential to contribute positively towards the world we live in, we lost millions of chances to make the world a better place, infinite members of future generations. If we can learn something from every person, how much wisdom we’ve been deprived of.

Everything we take for granted is something which could very possibly have saved their lives. The coats we wore, the sturdy shoes on our feet, the slightly stale sandwiches we’d packed for lunch, the American and Israeli passports we held, and the Israeli flag we carried and everything it stands for.

In Birkenau, I felt a sudden urge to cut the barbed wire fence that had once been alive with electricity, that had kept my great-grandmother prisoner in a sickening nightmare that was her reality. A demolished gas chamber was a heavy reminder that, although Hitler lost, he left behind the ruins of the evil he’d perpetrated. When we finally walked out, my friend pointed out how easy for us it was to do exactly what so many people had been desperately longing for; we take these simple freedoms for granted. 

Four of my great-grandparents were survivors of concentration camps: Victor Gelb lost his first family, a young wife and two small children; David Salamon had been the top student in his yeshiva in Sighet, and had a bright future ripped from him along with nearly all of his family; Arnold Goldsmith had been my age, and he lost his entire family (who’d been in Germany since the Spanish expulsion) and close-knit community to the Nazis, left with only his ardent religiosity and painful memories to build a new life upon; Helen Jung Gelb had refused to let go of her mother Rachel and little sister Rivka, moving mountains to ensure their survival. Another two of my great-grandparents, Edith Wolf Goldsmith and Toby Elefant Salamon, had been able to escape Europe just in time, leaving behind everyone and everything they knew.

I’m grateful to be alive in the twenty-first century and for the existence of the State of Israel in which I am privileged enough to live, which my ancestors had hoped and prayed for and had dreamt of for centuries.

All it took was six years to wipe out a thousand years of European Jewry. But we’ve emerged stronger now, and when we say never again, it’s not a plea.

Jewish blood is not cheap.

As for the six million who were brutally slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis, we will continue to search for their names, commemorate their lives, and honor their memories.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)