Yom Hashoah 2018

The first Yom Hashoah was observed on December 28, 1949, a date chosen by the Israeli rabbinate not because it bore any connection to any specific Holocaust-related event, but because it corresponded to the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tevet, a minor fast day that already existed and which, it was felt, could reasonably be co-opted to do double-duty both as a marker in the annual cycle of days connected to the destruction of Jerusalem in the 6^th century BCE and also as a national day of mourning for the k’doshim who died as martyrs during the Second World War. The intended symbolism was clear enough—that if we survived the Babylonians and we survived the Germans, we can survive any onslaught directed against us—and was surely intended to inspire hope for the future of the State of Israel. But as Israel became a powerful nation defended both by a mighty fighting force and a formidable arsenal, the need to co-opt the Shoah as a symbol of hope for a national future for the State was destined to fade.

And so, although Yom Hashoah was observed on the tenth of Tevet again the following year, in 1951 the Knesset voted formally to establish the twenty-seventh of Nisan as Yom Hashoah instead. That date too had no specific connection to the Holocaust, but was considered a meaningful choice nonetheless because it fell squarely between Pesach, our annual festival of freedom, and Yom Ha-atzmaut, the day on which Israeli independence was declared in 1948. The message embedded in this date too was clear enough: that the establishment of Israel as a sovereign state was the only rational response to the Shoah, just exactly as the exodus from Egypt itself had once been the only possible solution to the enslavement of the Israelites. That, in my opinion, is a profound thought. But is it enough to motivate diasporan types such as ourselves to embrace Yom Hashoah not specifically as an Israeli holiday, but as a Jewish one as well?

It’s not like we don’t have alternate dates to consider. International Holocaust Remembrance Day, for example, was established by the United Nations in 2005 and scheduled for January 27, the day the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. Meant as a memorial day not only for the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, but also for all the other victims of Nazi terror—including particularly the quarter-million mentally ill individuals euthanized by the German authorities, as well as the 200,000 gypsies, the 9000 gay men, and the uncountable other innocents murdered by the Germans and their willing henchmen. Surely, no sensitive Jewish soul finds anything objectionable in preserving the memory of all the victims of the Nazis, not solely the Jewish ones. But there too the message embedded in the choice of date is meant to teach a simple message, that just as the world acting in concert was able to defeat fascism even in its most brutally powerful version, so should it be possible for the world’s nations, were they only similarly to act in concert, be able to defeat the forces of darkness that threaten the peaceful future of the world’s peoples today. That too strikes me as a profound thought, and my general inclination to hold the United Nations in contempt does not really spoil the cogency of the concept itself. But my question here nonetheless remains the same: is that notion powerful enough to justify an annual Shoah memorial day not specifically as a way of embracing the possibility of peaceful co-existence among nations working together to create a world of free people, but as a way formally of responding personally as Jewish individuals to the annihilation of European Jewry and acknowledging the specific place the Shoah occupies and possibly always will hold in the consciousness of Jews the world over?

Maybe the concept itself is flawed. Memorial days are by their very nature inclusive, but is it really possible to include millions upon millions of people in a single gesture of recollective grief? I’ve just finished rereading Amir Gutfreund’s magnificent novel, Our Holocaust, which I found even more stunning the second time ’round. The book is remarkable in a dozen different ways, but the key element that it stresses over and over is how each single individual murdered by the Nazis was an entire universe—a whole world of culture, personality, and potential. Under normal circumstances, that is, of course, precisely how we do respond to the murder of a single child or of an adult: as a tragedy of indescribable proportions precisely because of the inestimable value of any human life.

When seventeen children were shot down in Parkland on February 14, Americans responded as one with a kind of national paroxysm of grief that has yet totally to abate. That felt and feels entirely normal. But during the summer of 1944, 12,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered daily at Auschwitz. How can the same language be used to describe the murder of little Etan Patz, of the Parkland seventeen, and of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews murdered at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944? And 437,000 is less than a twelfth of the total number of Jews killed during the Shoah. No wonder there is something overwhelming even about the concept of having a memorial day to honor their memory—as though loss on that level even could be conceptualized, let alone conceptualized successfully enough for a single day of mourning to pay anything more than cursory, formal honor to their memory!

One tentative solution comes from, of all places, Germany itself.

There’s no easy way to translate the German word Stolperstein. The verb stolpern means “to stumble” and is, in fact, a distant cognate of the English. A stein is a stone. A Stolperstein, therefore, is a stone in the road that you stumble over, that you come across and pause for a moment to look at. But these Stolpersteine are not just inconveniently placed paving stones, but rather part of a remarkable effort first undertaken in 1992 by the artist Gunter Demnig, who had the idea to memorialize the Nazis’ victims one by one by placing a marker in the street at each individual’s last known address.  

In the years since then, more than 67,000 such Stolpersteine have been set into the pavement all across Europe in more than 1,200 different municipalities. They do not solely mark the last known address of Jewish people, however—they honor the memory of all the Nazis’ victims, including Allied soldiers murdered by their German captors in flagrant violation of every conceivable standard of decency in wartime. In Germany, each inscription begins with the words hier wohnte, the German words for “here lived,” which are then followed by the name of the individual being memorialized in his or her own home setting. When the numbers of victims connected with a certain address was simply too great for single stones bearing the name of each—for example, when Demnig’s team wanted to memorialize the 1,160 mentally-ill individuals deported to their deaths by the Nazis from the train station in Stralsund, a picturesque town on the Baltic Sea, they came up with the companion notion of a Stolperschwelle, a “stumbling threshold” set into the ground beneath the train station’s front entrance through which the unfortunates were made to march on their way to the trains that took them to their deaths in Poland.

It’s all too much to fathom. I live in a normal world, one in which the trial of a nanny accused of murdering two children has been written up in the paper on a daily basis for weeks. People’s interest in that trial hardly needs justification because the murder of children is among the most horrific crimes imaginable. And yet…this is the same world, this one in which the nanny is on trial for the murder of two—this is the same world in which twenty-five hundred children in the Kovno ghetto were sent to Auschwitz on two consecutive days in March 1944.

Maybe Gunter Demnig has it right—the numbers are just too great to contemplate, let alone actually to conceptualize, and the only reasonable way to mourn is on a victim-by-victim basis: one man, one child, one woman, one address, one year of birth and another of death, one fate, one loss.

When Sam Solasz, the father of our fellow Shelter Rocker Mark Solasz, spoke at Shelter Rock on Thursday evening, he was one man telling one story. It was gruesome, to be sure. And although he personally survived, he was able to make it clear how little likely his personal survival was…and how atypical his fate when compared to the Jews of his hometown and the other members of his family. His was one story…and that was perhaps why it was fathomable: one man, one set of details, one story of survival. That the dead aren’t here to tell their story leaves us in an obvious quandary, but the idea in both cases is the same: the burden Yom Hashoah lays at our feet is not to nod mutely at some unfathomable number, but to find the courage to accept that each individual victim of the Nazis was the loss of an entire world, of an entire universe.  It feels almost as though the burden is too heavy for any of us to shoulder alone. But that is the whole point of coming together as a community on Yom Hashoah, of course: to bear what none of us could bear alone, to shoulder a burden none of us could carry alone, to mourn in a way that none of us could bear on our own as individuals.

May they all rest in peace, those with graves and those with none, those with surviving family members and those with none, those with Stolpersteine marking the homes they were forced to leave on their journeys to oblivion and those whose homes are as yet unlabeled…or forgotten and unknown.