A Place and a Name

Mount of Remembrance, Jerusalem, Israel

We all knew we were going to go at some point; not because it was clearly marked on the schedule, but because this is one of the things you do when you go to Israel.

Yad VaShem is Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, built in 1953 by Israel’s parliament. The name Yad VaShem is taken from a phrase in Isaiah 56:5 meaning "a place and a name". The memorial Yad VaShem revolves around the idea of providing a place to carrying on the names of those who were killed. After the Western Wall, it is the second most-visited tourist site in Israel, with over a million visitors a year. After seeing the Western Wall many times during our three-month stay in Israel, it was time to experience Yad VaShem. Today, it was our turn.

I didn’t know what to expect. I had seen pictures, read stories, seen movies—but I didn’t know. This was no longer a story in a book or a portrayal on a screen; it was about to become a reality to me, and I was not ready. None of us were.

Endless books and media has been written and created about this event, but it will never be enough to do it justice. Reading my inadequate attempt to show you what I saw is not enough. Nothing will be enough until you see for yourself this glimpse of the shadow of the darkness that nearly extinguished an entire race of people; a darkness that has overshadowed an entire culture, leaving an everlasting scar on the hearts and minds of the people to this day.

The first third of the museum concerned Nazi Germany’s rise to power and Hitler’s strategy to bring about his Final Solution. First, German Jews were publicly persecuted and humiliated as anti-Semitic policies were put in place. Jewish people were labeled and set apart from German communities, forced to wear the yellow stars and publicly display their nationality. Their citizenship and passports were revoked as they lost all civil and legal rights; government-approved progroms like Kristallnacht became commonplace as terrorism and violence against Jewish property became the norm. As the Second World War broke out in 1939, German Jews were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to labor camps and starved to death; their belongings either became property of Germany or were burned in massive bond fires.

At this point in the museum, displays ceased to be newsreels of Nazi soldiers parading through the streets and became cases of belongings that were left behind by the millions who were removed from their homes. Words on a screen became real items owned by real people.

There were piles of books in both German and Hebrew that were supposed to be burned in a case to my left; metal instruments and contraptions to measure facial features in a time when racial purity was law and the fate of far too many were decided by the width of the nose or the roundness of the head. There were piles and piles of old trinkets—watches, hair combs, earrings, small toys—all left behind, each one representing a life that was reduced to a statistic. There was a child’s doll that caught my eye. It was old and dusty, hollow and empty with no stuffing or filling left in its limbs; there were black holes where the eyes used to sit—empty and lifeless.

I’ve seen photographs of rooms filled to the ceiling with shoes of prisoners who entered the gates of concentration camps; many never made it out, and none got their shoes back. I saw a small sample of aged leather shoes, small in number compared to the photographs. But if every two shoes was one person… I stopped counting.

In one display there was a lock of braided hair, golden brown, ribbon still intact. Lily was twelve years old when the Nazis knocked down her door. She had never cut her hair before so her mother cut one of her braids and gave it to the neighbors for safekeeping. Lily’s hair was here, but Lily didn’t make it.

Sprinkled between the displays were video screens showing survivors telling their stories, recalling horrendous things they saw and experienced firsthand. The museum was silent except for these survivors telling their stories in Hebrew. I stared at the screen and tried to imagine things I couldn’t imagine; when the video finished and started its loop again, I walked away in silence. What else could I do?

There were canisters of pebbled gas, some unopened, that never got the chance to empty their deadly payload on multitudes of innocent human being huddled together in some concrete chamber in the backwoods of Poland. I was looking at canned death, and probably hundreds of lives that were spared because these cans were never used.

I walked through the Hall of Names, a large circular room with bookshelves that covered every inch of the walls from floor to ceiling. The shelves were full of books that were all titled with the Hebrew word yizchor: “remembrance.” Each book was full of names.

The Children’s Memorial sits in an underground tavern as a tribute to the one and a half million children murdered during the Holocaust. Inside the memorial is completely dark, except for memorial candles suspended in the air and multiplied by mirrors, giving the effect of countless stars burning in the night sky. These candles serve as a burning reminder of the lives that had been mercilessly snuffed out. In the background a voice reads the names, age, and birthplace of young ones whose memory still burns bright in my mind: “Isaac Olberstein, Poland. Five years old.”

Three hours later when I walked out of the museum, my throat was dry and my hands trembled. Visitors huddled around each other in the courtyard, hugging and comforting those who wept for the millions. The clouds mercifully covered the sun and biting breeze whipped through the courtyard, sending more shivers down my spine. No one spoke. It was too painful to speak. There are no words. There was nothing to say.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to shed tears for all the names I’d read and all the stories I heard; I wished I could’ve cried. I should have. But I didn’t.

It took our group three hours to walk through exhibits full of little pieces of hell, preserved and locked behind cases of thick glass for the world to see. What I saw and what I heard, I will never forget.