I'm glad you read
Schindler's Ark (original UK title).
Think of that story as a snippet from a larger story:
One of my friends speaks the truth better than I can:
That is what the Nazis did; they didn’t just murder people, they murdered so many that they wiped out the gene pool of our people. The gene pool that survived is based mainly on those of us with grandparents who had the foresight to leave decades before.
And another quote from a visitor to the town of Auschwitz.
7,000 Jews lived there, in 1939 (estimated figure)
28 returned in 1945 (estimated figure)
The people of Oświęcim(Auschwitz) do a fantastic job of preserving the Jewish heritage and history of their town, efforts that are echoed throughout Poland. Nazism is dead, and the Jews are not. But I was told by our guide that ‘there is no Jew in Oświęcim today’.
It is difficult when standing in Oświęcim, surrounded by the remains of such a brutal, incomprehensible crime as the Holocaust, to shrug off the sense that on some level, Hitler won.
For how can life go on?
The truth of the matter is, it cannot. Not in the same way.
Gone are the shtiebels (prayer rooms), the homes, the businesses, and the people. The Jews of Oświęcim deafen the visitor with their silence. Their absence echoes in the synagogue, through the shattered cemetery, along the street of vanished Jewish buildings that overlooks the Sola River.
How many other places in Poland, in Europe, are irrecoverably diminished by the murder of so many of their citizens?
In Oświęcim, the Final Solution feels very final.
I know that these words sound strange to most Americans who aren't Jewish.
And Jewish-Americans are interested in Europe from a nostalgic and historical point of view.
But in the UK, if you're over 55 (like me), and you choose to live as a Jew (like me), you miss the children that didn't grow up.
The writers who never had a chance to be known or unknown.
The musicians who never had a chance to make music, for as long as they wanted.
The artists who never had a chance to continue painting or give it up and do something else.
I miss them all.
And I imagine what Europe might have been
And now will never be.
