A TRIP NEVER TO FORGET
`Obligation to the dead': Why Shmuley Boteach took his kids on an eight-week tour of misery to Holocaust sites
In the summer of 2017, I took my family — my wife and six of my nine children, ages eight to 22 — on a trip to hell. Rather than tour the beautiful sites of Europe, our mission was to explore the darkest places in Jewish history: Where Adolf Hitler was born; where he and his aides had formulated the Final Solution; where Nazis had ghettoized, deported and exterminated six million Jews; and where the last remnants of Eastern European Jewry subsist.
I'd been watching this tragedy slowly fade into the background of our collective consciousness. A modern, not an ancient, catastrophe, and yet the last witnesses were dying off. A year earlier, my friend and mentor Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, was lost to us, too. People were losing a connection to the most important object lesson, the greatest evil, that history had ever shown us. It was becoming academic, a question for films and books, not something told in the anguished voices of tormented victims. And as a matter of mere history, it was becoming obscure.
A 2018 study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that 11 per cent of U.S. adults and 22 per cent of millennials hadn't heard, or were not sure if they had heard, of the Holocaust; 31 per cent of adults and 41 per cent of millennials believed that two million Jews or fewer were killed; 41 per cent of adults and 66 per cent of millennials could not identify Auschwitz.
I felt a growing sense of urgency about transmitting knowledge of this wickedness, about doing what small part I could to fight the collective forgetting. Students of the Holocaust will never feel what Elie felt (not that we could or would want to). But we can immerse ourselves in the history — no, the experience — of it, what was left of it, to try to understand what led ordinary people to commit genocide and what allowed some of its survivors to heal.
I decided to bring my family into this experience. I thought it was my obligation to the dead. And since my children all grew up knowing Elie, I thought it would help them grasp the meaning of “never again.” They would surely commit themselves, after this trip, to preserving our Jewish identity and values, the very things the Nazis sought to destroy.
I never considered it inappropriate, even for my youngest. Three of my adult kids stayed behind, but I suspected the older children would appreciate the trip, because they are all interested and conversant in Jewish history. I knew things would be tougher for the younger ones, who wanted to have more fun. I wouldn't be able to reconcile their needs with my responsibility to honour the six million — how could we go to a concentration camp during the day and a movie that night? — but I thought we'd manage. In retrospect, I should have found outlets for them to escape the horror.
On our arrival in Germany, we set out for the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi, had hosted a January 1942 meeting — over cognac — to plan the murder of 11 million European Jews. We were unkempt, and I feared the kids would be groggy and uninterested. Instead, they were horrified and riveted. They didn't know what to make of a German high school group that arrived with their guide: The sound of German being spoken around the very conference table where Heydrich had proposed gassing Jews was jarring, even as they knew how important it was for German youth to confront their nation's past.
More troubling was the Israeli security guard who, hired to protect another U.S. Jewish group, came over to us at Berlin's main Holocaust memorial to suggest we remove our yarmulkes to minimize the risk of assault. ( We did not.) The kids felt a sense of menace in the country.
We began working our way across Europe so the children could appreciate the immensity of a continent-wide genocide.
“Please, Tatty,” my youngest daughter, Cheftziba, begged me on July 3, the day of our visit to Auschwitz in Poland, “don't make me spend my ninth birthday in Birkenau,” the part of the camp that housed the four main gas chambers that killed nearly one million Jews.
The whole point of the trip was to put us in the shoes of the children and parents who had lived through Hitler's terror. The Nazis murdered more than 1.5 million Jewish children. How many had birthdays in Auschwitz or the other camps? How many did not live to see their ninth birthday?
Still, I relented, and we went to Lodz instead. It, too, was no place for a party. The Lodz ghetto housed more than 245,000 Polish Jews between 1939 and 1945. Only 877 would remain by the end of the war. Cheftziba spent the most miserable birthday of her life as we toured the city's train station, from which hundreds of thousands were deported to Auschwitz. Miraculously, Lodz had a tiny kosher kitchen that sold takeout food, and I bought Cheftziba Polish dumplings for her birthday. But that scarcely raised her spirits as we hunted for the exact spot where ghetto head and Nazi collaborator Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski delivered a speech in 1942 imploring Jewish parents to turn over their offspring for deportation and murder:
“I am forced to stretch out my hands and to beg. … Fathers and mothers, give me your children. … I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation, I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take away children, and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid.”
Cheftziba assisted me in using online photos to identify the exact spot where it was given. After that, she was silent for a long time. Late that night, I apologized to her. She told me, in a sad and quiet voice, it had been a birthday she would never forget.
My children were particularly struck by our visit to Tykocin, a shtetl that looks like a set from Fiddler on the Roof. Nearly 2,000 Jews lived there before the war, about half of the population. It is believed the Einsatzgruppen, roving Nazi death squads, had murdered 1,400 in the nearby forest in 1941. Today, the town is a museum. It has a synagogue dating to 1642 but no Jews to pray inside.
“It was like a ghost town,” said my 22-year-old daughter, Shaina. “It hurt because all the stories I grew up with about the shtetl of course acknowledged that there were persecutions and pogroms. But they were framed within an overall context of close-knit and passionate Jewish life. The Jewish baker, the Jewish butcher, the Rabbi, the Synagogue, the Jewish market. The whole shtetl coming together every Shabbos for community prayers. Here, there was nothing. You get there and you're like, ` Where are all these people?' Oh, they were taken to a forest and shot. I remember thinking, ` Wow, all these happy moments came to an end, and I'm standing here at that end.'”
We toured so many places of death that it took a toll. As difficult as it was for the young children, I was surprised to see how much it affected the older kids. They were deeply disillusioned with a God who had watched it and a world that had allowed it.
At one point, 19-year-old Rochel Leah became overwrought and had a crisis of faith. Like so many before her, she wondered, “How can you still believe in God after seeing Dachau and all the other horrible places?”
I knew the trip might induce nightmares, but I hadn't foreseen this kind of doubt. I felt a sense of failure when Rochel Leah, Shaina and Yosef, 16, insisted on leaving the trip early, three weeks after it began, with more than five weeks still to go. I wondered whether I should have taken my children on such a tour of misery.
I've had three years to reflect on that trip, and there's a great deal I would have done differently. I would have interspersed more recreational activities between visits to the killing fields, as incongruous as that sounds. In Vienna, we should have seen a Mozart or Strauss concert. In Warsaw, we should have visited the shops. In Krakow, we should have seen the Wawel Castle. At times, my kids thought me obsessed and mad.
But this was a once-in-a-lifetime journey, and my children needed to know what had happened to their people. Not because suffering is an essential part of Jewish identity or even because I thought it would make them more empathetic or humble. I've always wanted my kids to have happy childhoods and sought to protect them from unnecessary trauma.
Rather, we went because, as Shaina said when she saw the Budapest memorial along the Danube, with iron shoes representing the Jewish children drowned in the river: “We are here to remember the 1.5 million children of the Holocaust even if it leaves us incensed at God. We're here because the six million don't want to be forgotten.”
They cry out to be recalled. They don't even have tombs. Their tomb is our memory.