Calamity

     Last night, a friend's dad came to talk to us about the Holocaust (or in Hebrew the Shoah, which translates to calamity). It was a really moving story about his trials growing up in Greece and hiding during all the years based on chance and luck. His mom's Italian nationality played huge role in his and his family's quest for safety, providing them protection. It was a major reason he and his family were spared German concentration camps. All in all, it was a very different Holocaust story then the ones I am used to hearing. It wasn't about camps, or about watching everyone you love perish, but instead it was one about living in constant fear and hiding around Europe in hopes they could survive. Having a mostly happy ending, with there entire nuclear family remaining in tact and united, it showed me a very different aspect of the Shoah, and the luck, chance, and bribery that played in survival.

     Today, we went to Yad V'shem, which literally means Hand and Name. This is the major Holocaust museum/memorial site in Israel. It was very moving and out of all the museums and memorials, this was by far my favorite. Of course this is an ironic statement, seeing as it is to commemorate the slaughter of 11 million people (which they said they recounted and the number is actually  something approaching 13 million), but the way they did it made a big impact and captured a real light to the people who were killed. This place gave them names and faces and families and jobs and homes and it gave them a sense of humanity which the Shoah stripped them of before their untimely deaths.

     Two things at Yad V'Shem really captured my attention. First, the child's memorial, which has widely claimed fame for being Yad V'Shem's most interesting and powerful display. Walking in to this pitch black room, all there was were candles to commemorate the one and a half million children lost. People remark on the mirrors, which appear to be holding millions of these candles, but I saw something slightly different and askew. Entering this memorial, I witnessed the blackness of the room. Not the colour or the cold, but definitely something that overcame me... a numbness. Unlike most other people, I slowly lifted my eyes to see only six candles, surrounded by a world of stars behind an eerie vail. 

      I suppose the vail was merely the glass, and the stars merely reflections of candle light, and the names echoing from wall to wall merely a broken record destined to play all the names of the children, recorded for 17 hours, and then over and over again. It might have just merely been a memorial, but I'm almost positive there were stars and an echoing memory in that room. Despite the rational behind what I saw and heard and most of all felt I just know it was stars and memories that I had witnessed.

     Something else that reached out to me was a photograph near the end of the 'tunnel'. Yad V'Shem built to represent a tunnel, we were approaching the liberation and came across this section that almost reached the closing of the war. Instead of hope, I saw this picture that took up a big portion of the wall all the way off to the right. It was blurry and black and white, but more vivd than anything I have witnessed. I just read the picture, and not the caption, and the simple words that came to me were that of  love and hate. It might be important to describe what the picture was of, but, again, all it showed was love and hate. Maybe it had a mother holding her daughter close to her. In her arms, hugging her tight, the child burying her face into the mother, while all the mother could seemingly do is whisper to her child... mouth pressed aside the child's ear. The image of never letting go, even when the child's feet were dangling in the air, not inches above from a grave most likely to be claimed as their own. Love is for the family who wouldn't let go. What appeared to be six feet away, the a soldier held up a rifle, eye-piece on his face and the barrel in his hand, cocked and ready to fire a deer hundreds of feet away, yet this prey was close enough to touch. Only six feet away, soon to be a shallow six feet under. In the position to fire, and in the mindset to kill, hate is for the people who try and abolish love. Hate is for the man who has blood on his hands.

     Maybe, I could be wrong, and it was not in fact a picture of all of this. Maybe, it wasn't a German soldier, maybe it wasn't a mother, maybe it wasn't a child, or a ditch by their side. It might have not been a shotgun, and maybe I was all wrong, for after all it was a picture as blurry in quality, as it was in the tears looked through by sad eyes. But what I remember vividly and clearer than its poor quality, was the great pain it caused me to feel, and the heartache that rattled my ribs, and most importantly the love and hate instilled in me with one single shot.

     If the Shoah was the world's Holocaust, then this picture is my personal calamity.