Day 9 part 1

Yad Vashem

This morning we woke up to go to Yad Vashem. I was rooming with one of the Israeli soldiers from a K9 unit, Tal. We started talking about some American television that we both enjoy, and he told me that he wants to get into comedy later on, and he already does some standup. He asked me how I was enjoying the trip, and I told him that I was having an excellent time. Then he told me that he thinks the whole thing is kind of crazy and if I wanted to marry a non-jewish girl then I should go ahead and do that. He said that it does not always sit right with him that he is privileged in Israel just because he happened to be born Jewish.

Today was Yad Vashem. The most striking part of Yad Vashem is not in the sheer size of the museum (it is huge) but in its brilliant design. The architect, Moshe Safir, is a McGill alum who was born in Tel Aviv and who also built Habitat 69. The museum is built into a hill, and is a huge triangular prism with side rooms that you walk through. Once you enter you are confronted with a large video screen of spliced film from the early parts of the 20^th century. The screen depicts snippets of Jewish life in Europe before the war. There are children singing hatikvah, men in cafes, delis, shtetls, playing violin etc. The next room contains a basic rundown of the history of anti-Semitism. First, religious anti-Semitism, then racial anti-Semitism then its holocaust related mutation, nationalist anti-Semitism. The room contains a very good deal of old Nazi signs and banners and cartoons of the most hateful kind.

The next part of the museum documents krystalnacht. The hallway gets a little darker and narrower. Scenes of rabbis being humiliated on donkey carts, business destroyed, children and parents in the streets are shown on video screens and in photographs hanging on the walls. We move along to the next section and the hallway continues to get narrower and darker.

The next few sections record the process of internment. Jewish land and property is confiscated. Everything is taken away, and Jews are given jumpsuits, their heads are shaved and they are sent to camps. Some work, but are not well fed, and begin to waste away. There are not many pictures from inside these camps during the war so most of this part of the museum consist of the items that were discovered….shoes, jewelry, clothing. A diary, passport or photograph, but no pictures, no people. You get the feeling here that these people have already died…you would not recognize them in a photograph even if you saw one.

Next section: concentration camps. Again not many pictures. But there are models, and sculptures. Each death camp is displayed. So are the statistics: between 800,000 and 4 million died at Auschwitz, one hundred and fifty two thousand at Chelmno, four hundred thirty five thousand at Belzec, seven hundred fifty thousand at Treblinka, and the list goes on. Pictures of the gas chambers hang on the walls. The museum is at it narrowest here. On a crowded day, like today, you are herded through the exhibit pressed up against those around you, with little control of your own movement. Everyone walks the same path in the museum and you can’t skip any part.

We are all getting claustrophobic at this point. Someone in the group is hyperventilating or something, but they are far back. Luckily the hallway widens and we get a little more light. The next section is liberation. This section is, by far, the gruesome. As the war ground to halt in Europe, the Russian and American armies discovered death camp after death camp in Poland and finally revealed to the entire world exactly what had happened in Hitler’s Germany. Emaciated, bald, androgynous figures stare blankly at the camera, looking ready to collapse. Everyone has seen these photos. Bewildered American soldiers stare back at the figures, unable to really get it. There are videos too. An U.S. army caterpillar tractor is pushing a mountain of bodies into a grave. Some of the arms, legs, heads get crushed under the blade, the tractor backs up and takes care of the ones that it missed.

The exhibit is almost over. We move onto the next section. Back into the main corridor of the triangular prism, it we can breath easily again. There is space and there is light coming in through the huge glass window at the end which is no clearly visible. The last room to see is the hall of names. A giant room with drawers on all the walls. The names of every victim of the holocaust known is kept in these drawers. From the ceiling hangs a conical structure in which the photographs of thousands of people who died are displayed. Directly below the structure is a giant hole in the ground with a guard rail around it, about 12 meters deep with a few inches of water at the bottom. When you look down into the water you see your reflection among the thousands of photographs that are hanging above you.

Finally we reach the end. The end of the triangular prism juts out of the side of the mountain toward Jerusalem. There is a large patio from which you can see nearly the whole city and all the surrounding hills. Today the sky is perfectly clear and the temperature is perfect. We have some free time now before we will go to for services.