Remembrance and Hope

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShaoh) in Israel. In commemoration of Holocaust victims, a siren went off at 10AM for two minutes as everyone paused in silent remembrance. Even the traffic on the highway in the Hinnom Valley below us stopped.

I was talking to one of my Israeli teachers after class when it went off. She stopped mid-sentence and silently bowed her head while the siren rang. Such a powerful, haunting moment.

This afternoon, my friend Eva and I went to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum. The displays took you through the events leading up to, during, and after the Holocaust, filled with real, time-period objects and recordings of first-hand testimonials of each event.

The displays and video recordings themselves were extremely moving, but what made it especially tragic to me today was going through these exhibits with Jews beside me. The corridors of the museum were filled with religious and secular Jews of every type (from ultra-Orthodox to secular) and ethnicity.

Standing beside them as they read the displays of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda filled me with such remorse and shame—I had the desperate urge to jump in front of the exhibits and block the terrible words from their eyes. This racial hatred has never seemed so deeply appalling to me before, especially after experiencing the beautiful Jewish culture firsthand here and getting to know some of them personally.

Watching their faces as they walked through the sections on the ghettos and death camps was also heart-wrenching. What must have been going through their minds as they listened to first-hand Hebrew accounts broken by sobs, looked at models of death camps, saw rows of urns used for the ashes of their people massacred?

Though most of the journal entries displayed were written in Hebrew, one Jewish girl translated one of her final journal entries into a few other languages, including English. As she awaited her fate in a German ghetto (itself a place of terror, starvation, and imprisonment), she wrote, “Fears are aroused…when will the question of ‘to be or not to be’ be lifted from our shoulders?”

The museum not only portrayed the horrors of the Holocaust, however, but also some of the beauty and triumphs that came out of it. Stories of sacrifice and devotion were scattered throughout the displays: an artist making picture books to relieve trauma for ghetto children, a photographer smuggling out pictures of real Nazi cruelty to rouse a deaf world, a rabbi leading his starving congregation in singing, “God is with us, we will not fear.”

Though the Holocaust is very sobering, these stories of hope and triumph have always been life-giving to me. Anything these people say is the furthest thing from cliché.

Here’s one a friend showed me that I wanted to pass along. Scratched onto the walls of a cellar in Cologne, Germany where Jews hid from Nazis were found these words:

I believe in the sun when it is not shining.
I believe in love when feeling it not.
I believe in God even when He is silent.