Holocaust museum, Jerusalem, March 15th.
She fell before the exhibit of the Treblinka Death camp where 870,000 Jews lost their lives. Not a dramatic fall, just standing one moment, gone the next. “Open up! all asleep!” The German commander would yell after listening at the gas chamber door, said the video interview playing over a model of the camp; it was the job of this old man — no, boy — speaking to us on the screen to pull out the bodies. Elijah Rosenberg. “Someone would examine the teeth,” he said, opening his mouth to demonstrate, “pulling out any gold.”
The woman — no, girl — who collapsed onto the museum floor before the first death camp was very young, only 18, but in Israeli army uniform. A pack of brown clothes and red eyes sobbing and shuffling through the museum. “Every moment someone would collapse in a faint,” said one video survivor of the Warsaw ghetto firestorm of 1943. The TVs are not just monitors, they are also mirrors, reflecting the viewer’s image — we have become ghosts of the present watching history.
“Why do the trains go full and return empty?” half a boxcar in front of us, “it makes no sense,” asks a Polish resident long, not long, ago. The tour buses, huge padded coaches idle outside the museum; they come full, and leave full.
Written in pencil inside a railway car:
“Here in this carload
I am Eve
with Abel my son
if you see my older son
Cain
Son of man
Tell him I”
Nothing, except life, finishes, or, there is nothing more to say.
“In a jungle, only predators survive.” says one tearful old man–no, boy–on a screen. He found his grandmother dead then ate the precious bread roll people kept under their pillows. Only when finished did he tell the family of her death. But he is here, old, on the screen. He survived.
It’s disconcerting when soldiers run past you, afraid, a blur of brown uniforms breaking rank. I try not to worry, they remind me of children. It’s snowing outside, in March. No one is ready for it. I’m hungry, it speeds me to the clean cafeteria. A film shows bulldozers pushing emaciated corpses into ditches. Allied Americans come with film cameras and Hershey bars. They can not approach at first, each standing at bay, each encountering an alien race.
Young Israeli soldiers travel in packs, a rite-of-passage, a three year mandatory service. Hello-Kitty fobs dangle from mobile phones in their commando pockets. Too emotional, not a good soldier, she fainted, they hold her legs up. Finally field training comes in to play, and hopefully, finally.
Tim from Kentucky sits across me in the commissary, a dental psychologist. A what? “People have fears of needles, drills, people reacing in…” he tells me.
Go to a holocaust museum hungry, that is the best way to see it. I ravished my plate. Starved for so much. I will never, ever, know hunger. Starvation. Hate. I’m still not satisfied, not sure I’ll ever be. I glance at and consider eating the bread roll on the abandoned tray next to me. The person it is gone, why not?
The exhibit concludes with the British relenting and the state of Israel being formed. The girl–no, the soldier–is back on her feet, the army solemnly marches on.
Jake.
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