Yad Vashem
Trip Start
May 18, 2008
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Trip End
May 28, 2008
Jerusalem, Israel
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
My friend and I drive to her children's school, the British School of Jerusalem. We park there and walk down Jaffa Street to the Central Bus Station to find out about ways to go to Yad Vashem. We walk back the same way: I take 2 or 3 pictures of a Greenpeace demonstration (it seems everywhere I travel Greenpeace is preceding me, like back in 1992-1993 when they demonstrated against the French in Australia and New Zealand, the famous Rainbow Warrior affair) against coal, and how coal is a killer.
We stop over at the Mahane Yehuda Market: our noses fill with all the fragrances of the fresh produce, the spices, the fish.
My friend drives me to Yad Vashem
Frontispice British School in Jerusalem
. I spend about 3 hours there. The contrast between the light outside (the blaring sun, the absence of clouds, the reflection of the sun on the yellow/ocre/golden stones used to build the monuments, making the whole area even more luminous) and the darkness of such places as the Hall of Remembrance or the Children's Memorial, a darkness very symbolic of the Shoah, is intense. The visitor can feel, can "touch" the fear that must have taken hold of the people being carted off to the gas chambers. Inside the Children's Memorial particularly, this palpability of fear becomes "real" when one thinks of all the children, so often scared of the dark, separated from their parents, -all alone even though surrounded by other children just like them-, sent alone to an atrocious death. My heart felt a strange and deep squeeze and tears came to my eyes and are coming back now while I write about it. The flickers of the flames that multiply through a clever set of mirrors to make ways through the darkness (out of it?) evoke all the dead children's souls.I hope there are 1.5 million flames for the 1.5 million innocent children murdered by the nazis and their accomplices. There are voices, - I seem to remember only female voices- saying outloud the names of the children, their country of origin, how they died. As I walked inside the Memorial, taking the measure of the many generations lost because of the children's deaths, I thought of S. A. She was the first to tell me about the Children's Memorial when I was a young university student, interviewing her for a radio program I produced
Damascus Gate at Night, Jerusalem
. Her descriptions of the place were so accurate, so detailed, than when I first stepped into it, I knew where I was. She now is with these children, maybe telling them stories the way she told me stories.The Hall of Names is less dark but still very sober: a round room filled with thousands of binders containing the names of all who perished. On the round dome-shaped ceiling, pictures of the dead reflect themselves on the water at the bottom of the central pit. Again, this effect demultiplies the room and thus gives the visitor an indication of the scope of the Shoah.
The Museum itself is interesting. It is done in a very "American Museum" way: very educational but with too many artefacts and stations to read. Guides are leading groups: the three dominant languages are English, Hebrew and Russian.
It is obvious that the Russian Jews are here because they need to be educated about the Shoah, especially since most of them were never raised as Jews at all or are not even Jewish in the eyes of the Torah (their Mom was/is not Jewish) but nonetheless are living in Israel. The biggest and most recent immigration wave from abroad to Israel (called "aliyah" in Hebrew, as in "going up, climbing, ascending", a meaningful connotation) consists of hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews who came to Israel after the fall of communism
Greenpeace Against Coal, Jaffa Street, Jerusalem
. I was standing by a couple of young Russian women - in their late 20s, early 30s- in front of a desk showing artefacts taken from Italian Jews sent to the death camps. There were a lot of exquisite and minutely crafted pieces of jewelry in massive 18K gold, with diamonds, turquoise stones, pearls, etc. The two young women commented on the beauty of the items, saying how they'd buy this one or that one. I am a person who is rarely shocked, but this time I was. How can anyone speak like that in a place like this! I though maybe their torturers, maybe the persons who came to raid their house and send them to their death, were speaking in the same way, their voices greedy, not compassionate.
I also noted that the teenagers were rather rambuctious on the way out and making jokes: maybe it is their way of dealing with all the emotions that overwhelmed them when they were inside. Some, still inside, sit on one of the few stools, looking bored or having what sounds like a casual daily life conversation. I cannot help but ask myself if it is because they are Israelis that they can treat the Holocaust so matter-of-factly, with nonchalance even, or if it is because so many years have gone by since 1945, or because survivors are fewer and fewer. Do the younger generations talk about the Holocaust outside the Museum, say with their grand-parents, or great-grand-parents or not? Do they feel that their generation is also a war generation because the country presents itself as a country at war since its birth in 1948? I cannot help but wonder whether the original purposes of Yad Vashem, -denouncing the atrocities of the Holocaust, insuring that "Never Again" such a thing could happen, asking the visitor to "Remember the Children"- are not forgotten and in their place a new purpose stands, that of justifying the country's government's current actions by constantly reminding the Jewish visitor -local or living in Diaspora- of what is at stake, the existence of a Jewish State as a refuge for anti-semitism? I wonder whether the Wall that separates Israel from the Palestinians would have been built by the generations who survived the Ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz..
Greenpeace Demonstration, Jaffa Street, Jerusalem
.I take the shuttle bus back to the top, then the #18 bus back to Central Bus Station. I finally manage to find a shop that sells maps and buy one.
Walking back towards my friend's children' school, I buy a falafel sandwich and a baklava at the Mahane Yehuda Market. My friend's husband's driver is there and this time I am being driven in an armored vehicle, also bearing a big UN on the front hood and the doors. No help at all: the Israelis hate that the UN is omnipresent even if discreet, the Arabs do not understand the UN is here to help! We drive through Mea Shearim, the Jewish ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem: lots of "dati" walking by...
In the evening, my friend and I go on a tour of "Jerusalem by Night" in her car. I enjoy all the views but my pictures of Damascus Gate by night are no good: one of the big disadvantges of digital camera... We take a late herbal tea at the American Colony Hotel, a splendid hotel with gardens to die for, especially the interior yard. Plants are exhalating bewitching fragrances: jasmine, roses, it is amazing how the flowers -and the vegetables on the market!- have an odor here. Not like back home in the US where the absence of smells becomes disorienting.
Final thought of the day: I did use my Hebrew book a bit, but I mostly spoke...Russian. So much for the 6 months Hebrew Oulpan I followed back in university.
