I don't know exactly when it started for me, but I don't think it goes way back. I traveled to many European countries over the years and I don't recall it being so "central" for me. If it happened to be "on the way" or "easy to get to", I might have visited a site, a synagogue or another related place, but I did not go out of the way for this. That is until the past 5 or so years in which things have shifted for me. Today, I put such visits right smack in the middle of my "planning itinerary".
Even as we nudge ourselves to 80 years after, Eastern Europe, and to a certain degree, Western Europe as well, all house so much of the memory of how 6 million Jews went to their death, communities destroyed, culture wiped out, survivors emigrated. For me, I know that the passing of my father in 2019 and my doctoral dissertation on the second generation completed in 2023, both of these got me very focused in this respect: we are seeing the last remnants of the survivors leave us, memory is fading, we are drowning in struggles around current wars and events. If we don't make it our business to protect, salvage, remember and teach, who knows where we will be in 20 years down the road. If the Holocaust is important to remember- and for me it is both a sacred act and vitally essential as Jews and as human beings to do so- we must keep this at the top of our consciousness. Nothing is easier than to forget what we don't want to remember.
Hungary and Slovakia: engaging with the Shoah
With this in mind, it comes as no surprise to me that our recent visit of two weeks to Budapest and Slovakia, which was replete with beautiful nature, hospitable people, seamless getting around and wonderful weather, also had its "Shoah angle". The Holocaust legacy of my family has no connection to Hungary and Slovakia, so it came as a surprise that my "thirst" to connect here was strong and determined. The magnet of "learning about the Shoah" here pulled me right in from day one, with a free walking tour in Budapest, visit to a Holocaust museum and discussions with locals about this as well. It completely boggles the mind in a way that I just can't full describe: In Hungary between 15 May and 9 July 1944, over 434,000 Jews were deported on 147 trains, most of them to Auschwitz, where about 80 percent were gassed on arrival. The quick progress of the deportations was enabled by close cooperation between the Hungarian and German authorities. So late in the war, the Germans were clearly losing rapidly and yet they did not give up on killing the Jews as a major war goal. Hard to digest...
In Slovakia, I found myself looking on Google maps to see where the Jewish cemetery of any given town was...was in intact or was it dismantled to make way for new housing projects? I sought out this sign in the town of Poprad in northern Slovakia, a small sign in the railway station, as it was the first deportation of the war to Auschwitz: 997 young Slovak women and teens who were tricked by Slovakian authorities and told that they would be going away to do government work service for just a few months, the Jewish girls and women were actually sold to the Germans by the the Slovaks for 500 Reich Marks (about $200) apiece as slave labor.
Nearly wherever we went, in between the hikes, city walking, wining and dining, I was finding myself looking into yet another part of the "Holocaust Story" of Slovakia. About 100,000 Slovakian Jews were killed in the Holocast, about 20,000 survived. Each village, each part of the country has another story. As I looked on at these cemeteries in towns where there were so few if any Jews living there, I wondered- how long will it last? How long will these communities allow for these "historical graves" to exist, amidst the ever-increasing desire to use the land for all the reasons people gobble up land all over the world- development calls, investments attract, that is life. I know for a fact that many of the hundreds, if not thousands of such Jewish cemeteries all around Eastern Europe have already been lost forever...
For me, my feeling is that the least I can do- and want to do- is to pay my respects to these places by visiting them. It won't undo the horrors of the past, it won't solve the cemetery vs. land issue, but perhaps it will put the mark on the map, if only in mind and emotion: Jews lived here for centuries and were put to death, their communities destroyed. We won't forget them.
Fighting a losing battle? Perhaps, but for me I feel a great sense of meaning in just learning about the places, the story and the people, whom I never knew. For me these places have become part of what it means to visit Eastern Europe, for whatever reason it may be.
The least we can do is remember. Nobody else will do it. Every person deserves that, certainly these unfortunate Jews whose life ended in the ultimate tragedy.
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