Today we visited the Holocaust Museum for a tour with Dr.
David Oughton from Saint Louis University, co-author of “Jewish-Christian
Relations in Light of the Holocaust”; and afterward we listened as Mendel
Rosenberg, a Holocaust survivor of Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps
and ghettos, shared how he and his mother made it through hell. I was blown
away by hearing an actual survivor tell their story. To be frank, I didn’t
realize survivors were still alive.
I’ve heard so much about the holocaust all my life. I’ve
seen so many pictures, watched so many movies and documentaries, read so many
books; but never have I heard a survivor share their story live. Mendel was in
his teens when he experienced the horrors of ghetto life and concentration
camps. His father and brother died, and he witnessed nearly unspeakable tragedy
in his own life and in the lives of others. I say ‘nearly’ because he is, of
course, speaking about it. It still blows my mind how much courage it must take
to have to relive those memories of such deep sorrow and loss over and over
again to tell people what happened. I honestly can hardly face the prospect of
watching harm come to my family, and to have to suffer and then speak is almost
unfathomable to me.
Part of me just wants everyone—individuals, museums,
universities, community programs—everyone to leave the survivors alone. After
all they’ve been through, now they are condemned to telling their stories for the
rest of their lives? But besides realizing how necessary it is for the stories
to be told for the sake of preventing injustice from repeating, I also heard
something Mendel say today that changed my mind a bit about the good of telling
the stories for the survivors themselves. He said that for 30 years after being
released, he had nightmares on a nightly basis about him and his family running
from the Nazis. He said that he didn’t want to talk about his experience for a
long time, but when he finally did decide to talk about it, the nightmares instantly
ceased. When someone in the audience asked about this during the Q & A
time, he said he thought it had something to do with setting a goal and working
towards it. Maybe those deep sorrows and fears were finally channeled into a
life-giving pursuit? I personally also think there may be something to the idea
that expressing what’s inside the mind, even the deeper, darker fears and
distresses, helps to provide a catharsis for the bottled up emotions and might
even help work out the thought-kinks by full, un-stymied existence as opposed
to suppressed cognitive travail. It is true that most things we hope to solve by
critical thinking and creating a logical plan, or instead, actively
not-thinking and hoping the problem disappears; but as the poet Rainer Rilke
wrote, maybe we solve some things simply by existing them back into nature
through the doorway of our own DNA:
“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books
written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could
not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the
point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far
in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into
the answer.”
Either way, I’m glad to here that Mendel is finding some
peace. And it was awesome to see photos of his sprawling family of kids and
grandkids. He seems happy, and has a great sense of humor. And he’s doing great
things in the world simply by keeping his stories from clotting and being
forgotten. The gift of keeping the wounds of his memories fresh for new
generations of people to see what he saw is not lost upon me. I am grateful.
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