Facing the Holocaust and Its Victims: A Personal Challenge

Facing the Holocaust and Its Victims: A Personal Challenge

© 2008

A. Jill Gaebel

When I was a teenager, I read "The Diary of Anne Frank". I can't remember all the details of her story. What I remember most is feeling sorrow for her, and I recall having a growing sense of anticipation and dread as I progressed through the book.

I grew up in a time when WWII and the Holocaust weren't quite as much a part of the past as now. I remember that while I was still young, the Nazi war criminals were being pursued, caught, and tried. Some had taken new identities and begun new lives in places like Brazil, but the determination to find them was relentless. They were brought to account for their participation in the atrocities they helped Hitler to bring upon masses of their fellow humans.

I don't know exactly when it was that I found I couldn't bear to think about the Holocaust and the details of it much, let alone read about, see movies on it, and look at the pictures of it. I was always sensitive and empathetic to the suffering and tragedies to others, and that sensitivity grew as I aged as did my avoidance of it. I felt guilty and cowardly about it. After all, I didn't actually experience it as did the victims of it. I didn't endure the extreme physical and mental torture that was inflicted upon the Jewish population. I didn't suffer the indignities and agonies that they suffered. How could I be so arrogant as to say it made me suffer too much to look upon the pictures of those who actually experienced it?

It did though. It broke my heart to look upon the faces of the children, the aged, the men, the women. It made me want to take their suffering from them, even though I know that I couldn't endure it with the strength and courage with which so many of them did. Thus, for many years of my life, I remained in avoidance; I hid from the Holocaust and those poor, unfortunate souls. In essence, I turned my back on them.

Recently a friend and I were going to make a trip to the area of Florida near St. Petersburg. My friend, Buzz, has an interest in World War II and in the Holocaust. There is a Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg that I knew he would like to visit, so I agreed very reluctantly, even nervously, to go. I have another friend, in England, Jim, who also has an interest in the Holocaust and, in particular, the victims of it. I had told him about the interest Buzz has in it and that I had agreed to see the museum with much dread.

Jim told me that I must go and that I must look upon the victims and embrace them, not with sadness and horror, but with love. He told me they need our love.

So, Buzz and I went to the museum. He went in interest, I went for him and for what I felt was a mission that I must perform for the victims. You are thinking that so many of them died, they don't care if I go to a small Holocaust museum, they don't care that it was a personal challenge for me to go there and meet them. I think they care. I think they need our visitation and our embracing of them. More importantly, I think we need it as well. I think we need to be sure to remember them and to offer them honor and love.

This museum, although informative and impressive enough, didn't detail and display many of the extreme horrors that happened during the Holocaust. I think because a lot of school children were brought there to learn about it, and so it was constructed with it mind that they should be taught about it, but that some things were too harsh for their ages. I know that I went braced to be confronted with things I knew that were done to people that were the ultimate in indignity and suffering. Whatever a cruel human mind can think of to inflict upon another human, Hitler and his minions thought of it and did it.

Three things in particular impressed themselves upon me while there and have remained with me since. One was the box car that was on display. It was one of the boxcars that had been used to transport Jewish prisoners. This was not a large boxcar, but a hundred or more people would be crammed into it with less than standing room for them, and they would be carried many miles in suffocating heat. They were given no water, instead were taunted with it. They were so thirsty that they would lick the sweat from each other. Many died standing there crammed against the others.

I laid my hand on the boxcar. I don't know what I expected to feel. It seemed as though, in touching it, I could somehow touch those that had endured it.

Next was the printed information that I read about the mass graves. Bodies, dead or alive would be thrown into these massive pits. It described that children would sometimes be picked up by an arm or leg by a Nazi soldier, and tossed into the graves. Alive. Later, as Buzz and I were dining, a sudden and unbidden image of this, of a little girl, came into my mind, and I shuddered violently. Buzz asked me about the shudder. I don't remember what I answered, but I still get that image sometimes.

The third thing that stands out to me was a framed portrait on the wall of a little boy. His eyes caught me and held there for a moment. He was so real to me for a moment, and I felt such attraction and sympathy for him that, without thought, in my mind I saw myself hug him and I said aloud, "Aw, honey."

They make me cry.

We must remember and honor them. We must care. We must embrace and love them. It's hard. Lord, I know it's hard! It's so much easier for us if we don't look. We have to look, not just for them, but for our own salvation.