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Never Forget
They say that after awhile you just get numb. Your heart keeps beating, but it no longer aches. The mountains of facts and statistics keep piling on, but you just don’t feel it anymore. It’s impossible to feel, because you’ll just go crazy if you do. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself, bite your lip, just to make sure you really are still alive, really are still human.
I convinced myself I would never become numb. I think I’m a pretty passionate person. I love people and things obsessively and will usually do just about anything to make someone’s life better. Nothing could make me stop feeling. Especially nothing as terrifying as the remnants of the Shoah.
I did what every Jewish teenager is supposed to do (at least according to the youth groups and camps that run the programs) -- summer before senior year of high school, spend a few weeks in Eastern Europe learning the history, good and bad, and then spend a month and a half in Israel. There was never a question as to whether I would do it or not. Being part of the Jewish tradition at the end of the second millennium sealed my fate -- my older friends did it before me, my younger friends and sisters did it after me.
The two weeks in Eastern Europe had to be the most paradoxical of my life. When I read my journal, it’s like I was manic-depressive. One minute we’re on the bus, dancing and laughing, the next our tears are falling on the bright green grass overgrowing a mass grave. I guess you need the laughter to break up the sadness. And the laughter never prevented me from feeling the proper sadness. It just felt odd.
But not wrong, like the numbness. I can justify the laughter -- 30 teenagers together, there’s going to be craziness. But numbness.
[She pauses, her eyes closing as she tries to take deep breaths. The silence grows longer, uncomfortable.]
The first few camps we visited were difficult. No matter how much our counselors tried to prepare us, there was no way to prepare us for things like that -- actually facing the ovens where our relatives were consumed, walking over the fields where their ashes were haphazardly thrown, seeing the blue stains of the gas that suffocated them. My words, no matter how great of a writer I might one day become, will never contain the horror, the pain. It’s like waking up in the middle of the night, positive that you’re about to die, afraid to go back to sleep because you’re sure you won’t wake up. But a million times that. And here you’re helpless, because it already happened and nothing you can do will ever erase that history. At least you have the power not to go back to sleep.
There comes a point when you just can’t take any more. We were at Auschwitz, at the end of our first week. I had no problem with the morning -- I felt queasy in the barracks, cried in the gas chamber, had to walk away from the room full of hair, became enraged at the souvenir stands outside the entrance. Then, because we were going to Birkenau that afternoon, and it was just down the road, we ate our picnic lunch in the little park area in front of the gates, in the shadow of the iron warning “Arbeit macht frei.”
No one complained -- we were hungry after a long and stressful morning -- so we just ate in front of those gates that meant death for our ancestors. One girl, my best friend, refused to eat, because she thought it was wrong to eat there, after everything it stood for, everything we’d been through. It sickened her to try to eat in that place that killed so many of our relatives. We ignored her. I ignored my best friend. Somehow, during that morning all my emotions had drained from me. I had no more feeling except the primal need to satisfy my hunger. My friend was the only one who realized what was happening, the only one strong enough to resist it. After all the horror, despite my conviction, I had become numb.
Sometimes I think that numbness stays with me. Yes, I did cry and feel my heart break at all the other camps we visited, but it wasn’t the same. A part of me had realized that I was still alive, still young. I couldn’t dwell on the past or I would never get beyond it to live my future. But that’s not right -- that makes it seem good. This numbness is not good. I can tell people about my experiences like they’re nothing exciting, nothing valuable, like they didn’t affect me at all -- even though it was the most valuable two weeks of my life.
Even now, while I’m telling you this, I think I’m more upset over feeling numb. I should be upset that six million -- one third -- of my people died sixty years ago for no reason. I should be upset that people still don’t believe it really happened. I should be upset that Neo Nazis still terrorize the few of us who do remain. But it’s the numbness that hurts me most. The mere non-feeling. The thought that my heart beats, but only to keep me alive. That with numbness comes forgetfulness, oblivion. I’m the new generation. I’m supposed to keep the fire of faith and the memory alive so it never happens again. I’m supposed to care enough to hurt, to remember, to educate. But I have to bite my lip to see if I even remember what hurt feels like.
