I am not a Jew. There are things about the Holocaust that I can never understand, because it did not happen to me, or to my family. Today we visited the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. There can be no sufficient explanation of the horror of Nazi Germany’s attempted annihilation of the Jews. The poem of 14 year-old Jewish Auschwitz detainee Abramek Koplowicz illustrates the depth of the tragedy. I copied the words from a display holding the 15-page schoolbook notepaper written in the young Koplowicz’s clean handwriting.
Dreams
By Abramek Koplowicz, 14 years old
When I grow up and get to be twenty
I’ll travel and see this world of plenty.
In a bird with an engine I will set myself down;
take off and fly into space, far above the ground.
I’ll fly, I’ll cruise and soar up high,
above a world so lovely, into the sky.
And so delighted by all the worlds charms,
into the heavens I will take off, and not have a bother.
The cloud is my sister; the wind is my brother.
“Abramek Koplowicz was murdered at Auschwitz at age 14”
I couldn’t move for several minutes after reading the poem—my mind ran through a series of reactions; thoughts of anger, fear, rage, hopelessness, revenge, sorrow and bitterness. The rest of the exhibit was for me just more of the same information I had seen before Abramek’s notebook; the young poet had captured my heart, may he rest in eternal peace with the God of Peace.
Our Palestinian Christian guide Peter seemed to move away from the Holocaust experience too quickly for me. He immediately read some newspaper headlines relating to Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank, and in Israel. It was as if to say “The treatment of the Jews by the Nazis has nothing to do with the current conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis.” Some of the members of our group mentioned the apparent irony that many Jews in Israel do not recognize their participation in the confiscation of Palestinian assets (land), similar to the way that Hitler and the Nazis plundered the personal property of the Jews prior to his attempts at exterminating them.
As much as I am against the Apartheid-like treatment of the Palestinians, there is a difference in the two scenarios: many Arabs want to push the Jews back into the Mediterranean Sea because the UN gave Israel land in Palestine after World War II, and some Arabs want that land back. On the other hand, Hitler simply wanted to exterminate the Jews because of who they were—he hated them so. What the Arabs see as enforced property rights, the Jews see as another attempt at annihilation. The language of peace will have to attend to both concerns. In my view, peace will not come while the Jews continue to build settlements in the occupied territories of the Golan Heights and the West Bank, and while the Palestinians ignore the understandable Jewish fears of extermination. Life is indeed complex for the Jew living in Israel.
In the afternoon we visited the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane, on the lower part of the Mount of Olives. We saw the path that Jesus likely walked through the Kidron Valley and into Jerusalem, after his arrest in the garden when he was brought before Caiaphas, the High Priest. It was sobering.
We went back to our hotel in Jerusalem, the Notre Dame Hotel; it was indeed beautiful. I took a picture of the grand hotel from the front approach. It is a magnificent structure. This evening at dinner I took a long look at the face of each member of our group. I want to remember them, laughing, talking, debating and smiling, not the staged photos we have been taking in front of each historical sight. In the process of studying each face, I realized how much I am going to miss each person individually, not just the group as a whole. There is something unique about each personality that has attached itself in my memory. I will miss my travel mates a lot; perhaps I am just a bit sentimental because of the sites we visited today—they make you appreciate more the people for whom you care. What a day!
