Commemorating the Holocaust

By Patricia Blake

Amid memories of mass murder, a celebration of life

Most of the 4,000 men and women from 23 countries boarding planes bound for Israel carried an oddly shaped parcel. As airport security guards soon discovered, the packages contained rocks, some as small as a fist, some the size of a tombstone, all inscribed with the names of victims of Hitler's massacre of European Jewry. The passengers were Holocaust survivors and their children, headed for an unprecedented four-day meeting in Jerusalem, where their stones will be used to build a memorial for the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. Explained Auschwitz Survivor Ernest Michel, 54, who organized the gathering: "Since the victims have no graves where we can mourn them, we have brought to Israel pieces of rock from all over the world, so that our children, and theirs too, can have a place to mourn."

Rabbi Rubin Dobin, 65, from Miami, the national chairman of the American Anti-Nazi Association, who lost 85 relatives in the Holocaust, brought two stones. "One is for the 6 million, and one is for a memorial to the 5 million non-Jews who were killed," he said. "The Holocaust was a Jewish sorrow, but Jewish sorrow is enveloped in world sorrow."

The meeting opened on a note of scarcely tolerable grief as the participants huddled in the vast plaza of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem documentation center dedicated to Holocaust victims. In tears, they watched a sound-and-light show of the German conquest of Europe and of the eventual liberation, the sound track hammering home the pounding of Luftwaffe bombs. Whipped by a cold wind, the survivors broke into songs like I Believe, sung by their relatives on the way to the gas chambers. The group then recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Still, the gathering was also intended as a celebration. Michel, a New York executive for the United Jewish Appeal (though the organization did not sponsor the Jerusalem meeting), recalled that while in Auschwitz he and some other inmates had conceived the idea of a survivors' meeting after a fellow prisoner suggested that if they came out alive they might some day meet as free men. "We all laughed," Michel recalled. "But the idea stayed with those of us who made it." In Jerusalem, he tracked down three acquaintances from Auschwitz. When Julius Paltiel from Trondheim, Norway, threw his arms around Michel, the American said, "You see, we made it!" To criticism by some survivors who stayed home that the gathering would revive traumatic memories, Michel replied, "We are meeting because we want to see and touch each other again. We want to celebrate our survival and the survival of the Jewish people."

Many had come to Jerusalem in the hope of locating relatives and friends who had disappeared under the Nazis. Long queues waited to use a computer programmed with the names, home towns, countries and concentration camps of known survivors. While some peered intently into the eight monitor screens looking for names, others searched by walking around with large placards. Paul Berkowitz, a smiling twelve-year-old from Santa Maria, Calif., accompanied by his family, held up a sign with his father Sam's home town, Krzepice, in Poland. Sam Berkowitz's parents and his aunts and uncles were lost during the war. Said his wife Ann: "On our way to Israel we stopped in Krzepice and found no one. We're hoping so badly we can find someone here."

Other survivors wore T shirts with imprints of names, towns and camps. Among them was Jolan Deitch, 59, a Los Angeles housewife who lost her first husband, Herman Hornstein, in Auschwitz. Their daughter Erica, an office manager for a Los Angeles computer firm, wore a red-and-white shirt bearing the names of her mother's closest relatives. When Mrs. Deitch waited in line to consult the computer, another survivor complained that she would take up too much time with so many names to look up. Replied Mrs. Deitch, in tears: "It is better for you that your list isn't so long." Ultimately, she found a cousin who now lives in Miami.

The meeting was deliberately planned for the 36th year after World War II because the number 36 in Hebrew tradition symbolizes renewal of life. Despite the passage of time, many of the participants were still unable to accept the death of loved ones. Esther Kozminski of Beverly Hills, Calif., said that she had come to Jerusalem "to find my sister, a cute little blond of 14 when 1 last saw her. I have the right to know whether she is dead or alive." Kozminski was unsuccessful, but did encounter a friend from the Lodz ghetto in Poland.

The need to testify to the tragedy was strong. Visitors had been asked for tapes recording their experiences, and interviewers in four "oral history" booths worked nonstop taping individual tales of the Holocaust. An entire day was taken up by meetings of the 600 children of survivors who had come along. One was Menachem Rosensaft, 33, a New York lawyer who was born in a displaced-person camp at Bergen-Belsen, "a few hundred yards from the mass grave where Anne Frank was buried." Rosensaft is a leader of a second-generation survivor group: "We want to fight antiSemitism, to do something. The last time people burned synagogues no one did anything."

A primary concern of the participants was the growing number of books, pamphlets and articles that have appeared in the U.S. and Europe attempting to show that there never was a Holocaust. The most notorious example: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz, an electronics engineering professor from Northwestern University. Said European Parliament President Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor: "We are fighting the possibility of a second Holocaust. Already there are people denying that a Holocaust took place, but we are the witnesses and we will make our voices heard."

The closing ceremony took place at Judaism's holiest shrine, the Wailing Wall. There, the 4,000 from abroad were joined by an equal number of Israelis. As 6,000 candles flickered--each representing a thousand Jewish victims--Prime Minister Menachem Begin made an impassioned Zionist plea to the visitors to "come and bring your children to Israel." With that, the survivors dispersed, singing the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah--The Hope. --By Patricia Blake, Reported by Marlin Levin/Jerusalem

With reporting by Marlin Levin

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