Traveler learns in Europe she’s never done with Holocaust

By MIRIAM FEDER

article created on: 2009-03-15T00:00:00

This trip really began about two years ago, when I received a letter from a German friend who visited the Stutthof Museum and Archive and saw the numbers that my Grandmother and Aunt wore as prisoners there.

Her note shook me. I had always known about Selma and Eva’s imprisonment, about my mother’s flight from Germany at 17 in 1938, her father’s tears as he put her on the boat in Hamburg, knowing he would never see her again. I knew something about the cruelty and humiliation they all had suffered under Nazi rule. As a child, I was fascinated about my grandmother’s concentration camp experiences, but I was chastised not to ask grandma questions; they would give her nightmares.

Now I held a note from Gertrud, who never met my grandmother or my aunt, a kind woman of enormous integrity, generosity and reverence for the struggle my family and the other Jews of the small town of Rhine, Westphalia, had endured. She held a piece of my family that I did not. I turned the question many times. When I had the opportunity to go to Europe last month I decided this was the time to see this for myself.

My daughter had just finished a college course on the Holocaust, so her interest and background were well-primed. I could finally share this essential and terrible legacy. We prepared to be terribly cold and to see terrible things. We were not disappointed.

Berlin greeted us with face-slapping wind and treacherous sidewalks. At the restored Reichstag, we encountered the take-responsibility attitude I had been led to expect from Germany. The building’s 360-degree historical narrative starkly admits the hateful and cruel period that emanated from its walls. I had been hoping this in-your-face acknowledgement might prove somehow redemptive.

The stellas of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe offered a bit of refuge; the museum display was moving. I appreciated the frankness of the name.

I felt differently at the Jewish Museum of Berlin. This seemed to be a museum for someone who has never lived among Jews. That would be most Germans born since 1935. For me, it felt uncomfortably close to Hitler’s idea that after the final solution Jews would be something one learned about in a museum. My daughter saw it as an admission of “what we robbed from the world.”

I was surprised to be interested in the exhibits of the Checkpoint Charlie museum. It opened me up to an empathy with the people of Berlin that I didn’t expect to find. This city and these people had endured so much. Yes there was plenty of blame for the destruction of European Jewry and other effects of World War II. But I was reminded that it is people who always suffer in the name of ideology. The 20th century was a hard one on most all Germans, not just Jews.

After our five days in Berlin, we set out for Gdansk and that strip of Pomeranian Poland that Hitler felt was naturally his. Most Americans head for Krakow and Warsaw for their sad storehouses of Jewish history. W (503) 539-0274 e would get there, but first we would visit the Stutthof, a 70-minute bus trip from Gdansk.

The Stutthof is considered a “forgotten camp.” It was the first concentration camp outside Germany. It was created for political prisoners and prisoners of war and then “promoted” to the level of concentration camp after a visit by Himmler in January 1942. Jews began to be sent there from the Balkans in 1943 as the Russian army drove German lines westward. Many Jews were also sent there from Auschwitz during the summer of 1943. It was the last camp to be liberated by the Red Army, on May 10, 1945. It was at the Stutthof that Rudoph Spanner masterminded his technique of rendering “pure Jewish fat.”

We started with the Archive, where we were given two index cards—one card for each “Haftlinge” (prisoner) recording, their characteristics and their disciplinary records. Haftlinge: I was reading Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz,” so I was familiar with this designation, but it rose from the page directly into my throat.

The wooden barracks for the Jewish prisoners were bulldozed during the typhus epidemic of 1944. There was very little left of the Jewish end of the camp, just a small gas chamber and crematoria in a building that housed the Jewish part of the museum collection. Of course there were the guard towers, barbed wire, earlier barracks and a peculiarly haunting narrow-gauge railway. But most chilling were those easily accessible, orderly, typed and numbered index cards.

We walked the snow-covered camp. Surrounded by this memorial to those who died at the Stutthof I felt as though my two family members, survivors, were somehow lifted out of this place. For me, the awfulness explained there did not seem to address them so much, although I knew it was only their good fortune and strength that conspired to spare them.

With the Stutthof behind us, we were somewhat used to the cold, to the horror and to Poland. We saw no evidence of Jewish life past or present in Gdansk. We steeled ourselves for the worst in southern central Poland.

We had scheduled only an overnight in Warsaw. The museum there told the story of the ghetto very well. We searched for bits of the ghetto wall and we were dogged enough to find them, pushing through apartment courtyards and looking down at our uncertain feet.

It seemed unimaginable that this city once had the largest Jewish community in all of Europe. The Poles of Warsaw do not seem to have noticed that this quarter of their population were brutalized and murdered in their midst. It is not for want of monuments.They do glorify their monarchy and mark their heroic uprising. But the Holocaust, the terror bred of anti-Semitism, is not acknowledged in this grim busy city with so much sad history.

Next was Krakow with its famous tourist attraction, Auschwitz. Krakow is the lovely city everyone says it is. And Auschwitz is overwhelming in so many ways. It snowed most of the day we were there, dusting the camp in about 4 inches of new snow. I wondered if it was fair to blanket the horror in the fresh clean innocence of snow. My daughter noted it would perhaps be even more inappropriate to see this place with leafy trees and plants. I agreed; the neutrality and quiet of the cold was probably preferable.

There were visitors from everywhere and the cold, wind and snow kept the groups quiet and intense, respectful and diligent. There were no cokes and candy wrappers, only earnest footsteps.

After hours at Auschwitz we went to Birkenau and quickened our pace. This place was so immense and the weather so harsh we had to set out very purposefully to walk it all. The train schedule weighed on me. I suddenly knew we had to make the 3:35 train. The sun would already be diminishing and the chill deepening. We could not risk being there after dark. We could move quickly; there was little to say and little to understand. It seemed clear that however long we might spend in this place, no comprehension was possible.

Our hardest day was behind us: Auschwitz, the day we had steeled ourself for. I nixed a visit to Plaszow and Schindler’s factory. No, we were done with the Holocaust.

I was also quickly done with Kazimerz, the once thriving Jewish community that merged into Krakow and later became its wartime ghetto. Jewish life as a memory and a tourist attraction left me rather cold. I didn’t need to eat kasha varnishkes in an almost trendy neighborhood.

Instead we soaked in some amazing art and lot of delicious Polish cheesecake. We flew to London and enjoyed the theatre and one another before we went our separate ways.

I was grateful to reach the relative warmth and beauty of Italy. Two days into my travels in Rome, I wandered toward the Tiber and noticed a plaque on a building—16 October 1943. Comprehension slapped me across the face; this was the date and location for the deportation of Rome’s Jews. Even here, in a city with so many pasts, far from the frozen fields of Poland, we Jews have this horrible recent memory. I’m afraid that in Europe, I’m never done with the Holocaust.

Miriam Feder is a Portland writer and performance artist. This story was made possible by a grant from the Judith and Edwin Cohen Foundation.