Walking, Walking, and more Walking

On Friday, we had a tour of the Old City, some time off, then an optional visit to the Great Synagogue for Shabbat service followed by a Shabbat meal. I, of course, took advantage of all optional opportunities. :)

The tour of the Old City was interesting, for certain, although I think it would have been more interesting to me had I not just done a walking tour of the Old City (with a FANTASTIC guide) in October. We visited the Western Wall and then did something we had not done before, and that was visit the archeological ruins at the south wall. The coolest part of that was, as we stood there, we could hear the murmur of the Muslims praying just on the other side of the wall at the Temple Mount. Due to the fact that we are here during Ramadan, it's looking unlikely that we will have a chance to visit the Temple Mount, which disappoints me since that will be TWO trips to Israel without a visit to the Temple Mount.

At the Church of the Holy Sephulchre, I left the group since I had been to that church both in October AND on my first day in Israel when I took my roommate to see it as we strolled the Old City. I, admittedly, got a little cocky and decided to make a detour. I'm not going to detail that story here (it is posted on my other blog, athenajdavis.blogspot.com), but I did gain some insights from it that I will probably work through and post later on my other blog.

I didn't get back to our hotel until 5:30 (for those keeping score at home, that's 5 hours after I left the group and 6.2 miles later. Help us.), so I was pretty rushed to clean up and get ready for Shabbat service. I'm going to be completely honest here... I was really nervous about attending the service. Not because I wasn't interested, and not because it's not my religion, but because I wasn't certain what I was supposed to do! Ephraim gave us an elaborate schedule of the service and talked us through it, which was helpful. In the service itself, it was an Orthodox service, so women were upstairs and men down. We watched Steffy (one of our program directors) and mainly just followed her lead. It was really a unique experience.

Our Shabbat dinner was also pleasant. Ephraim explained the customs of the dinner, then we enjoyed a meal together. I am slowly finding a little niche other than just being friends with my roommate (whom I LOVE), so we had a great talk at dinner. Three people on our trip are employees of USHMM so I was able to pick their brains a bit. I got one incredible piece of news about one of the authors we study in HLit, but I'm going to save it till we get to her in class. :)

The Valley and a Friend

Today was just.... A perfect answer to the way I was feeling last night. We started with a session on creating a unit on a pre-war community, which was quite good. From that point, we spent an hour in the resource center where I found entirely too many films I want to use to fit into my Holocaust class. smile emoticon I found two incredible ones on my very favorite person from this period, Janusz Korczak. I kept tearing up watching them. He is my hero in every sense of the word.

After lunch, we had time in the Reflection Center and I decided I could be a better teacher if I had an awesome screen in the floor of my classroom where I could send discussion questions and such. (Also, if I had low lights and soft music. I might be able to make those happen, though.)  But seriously, although the Reflection Center isn't accessible online, it gave me some great pedagogic ideas.

From there, we toured the outside memorials: the Destruction to Rebirth art, the Warsaw memorial, the rail car (Memorial to Deportees), and finally down to the Valley of the Communities.

The cattle car (Memorial to Deportees, or, as I call it, “Journey to Nowhere”) at Yad Vashem is striking. Ephraim was sharing with us the reaction on the part of some of the survivors when the cattle car was brought to the museum. It was a sensitive and traumatic sight for many of them. He said the timing coincided with the start of the first Gulf War. When that war started, gas masks were issued to every person in Israel. They knew that Iraq had SCUD missiles and they wanted to protect their citizens. Imagine the effect of government-issued gas masks… now imagine the effect on a Holocaust survivor. When the second Gulf War happened, same thing… each family was given enough gas masks for every member. For children too young to wear them (babies), they were given a little tent to put the child in. (I CANNOT IMAGINE.) They have them  on a shelf in a closet now. But back to the SCUD missiles… at that time Israel had no defense system so, for the first time, American soldiers were on Israeli soil to shoot the Patriot missiles and intercept the SCUD’s. They did as militaries do and set up parameters for their encampments. In Ephraim’s words: “It was January, it was cold. Everyone needs chicken soup and comfort foods and the Jewish mothers were worried about those poor American soldiers, so they just went right around the blockades into the camps, taking them soup and home cooked meals. The American military wasn’t quite certain what to do with Jewish mothers who ignore barriers. We just like to take care of people here! When the soldiers were here, they came to Yad Vashem. Fatigues, boots, came to see the memorials here. When they came, Israeli children flocked around them, hugging them and singing. I’m not sure if American soldiers have ever been thanked the way those kids did that day.” Did I cry? YES, I did. Our country has its issues, certainly we do. But we also have so many who are so willing to give so much.

The Valley of the Communities... I don't know what to say, exactly. Let me start with this...

This is what it looks like from above. THEN you descend into the memorial and it becomes this...

The idea behind this memorial is that it remembers 17000 European communities whose Jewish populations were destroyed. I can't even express what it was that drew me in to this memorial, but I felt so connected to it. I might not ever get to Poland or Germany or Austria or Hungary. And truthfully, part of the reason I would want to go those places anyway is simply to stand in Lodz, Warsaw, Vilna, Bialystok... to pay homage to those I have read about whose everyday lives were stolen from them in those places. As I walked through this memorial, various towns jumped out at me... the town of Leonard Chill, who talked to my sophomore classes all of those years ago, the town of Gerda Klein, the ghetto where Petr and Eva Ginz lost their innocence... I felt, for just a few moments, that I was strolling through Europe, remembering the lives that were taken and those that were spared.

While there, we were so privileged to meet Ms. Hannah Pick, Anne Frank's best friend. What a precious, precious lady. She met Anne when they were tiny little girls at the grocery school. When it came time for kindergarten, she was terrified as a little refugee girl who knew no one to go to school. Then she saw, from the back, that little girl from the grocery and they became best friends. She said Anne always had a notebook and whenever anyone asked what she was writing, she would say, "None of your business!" :) Anne's special talent was that she could pop her shoulder out of place and back in and she took great pleasure in doing that to entertain her class. Her mother used to say about Anne, "God knows everything; but Anne knows it better." (She giggled as she said this, clapping her hands and saying, "I'm so glad I remembered to tell you that!")

Hannah told the story of their friendship all the way up until the point she went to Anne's house only to find out that the family had gone to Switzerland to live with family. That same day, Hannah's boyfriend was taken in a transport to Mauthausen. She lost her best friend and her boyfriend on the same day. Hannah's life took some crazy turns, as her mother got pregnant twice in the 1940's and the last pregnancy allowed her family to gain some time because pregnant women stayed behind until the babies were born. Her mother had the baby, but he was born dead, then her mother died shortly thereafter. Eventually Hannah, her sister, and her father were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Because her father had contacts high up, he was able to get them on an early list, List 2. Lists 1 and 2 went to Bergen-Belsen. Lists 3-40 went to Auschwitz and Sobibor.

In the camp, toward the end of the war, other transports came in and were divided from them by a high fence. They could hear the other ladies speaking Polish and German, which they didn't know. One day, they heard someone talking who was from Holland, so she yelled over to her. It was the lady who had been hiding with Anne's family (although Hannah just knew her as a neighbor lady at the time). The lady asked if she wanted to talk to Anne, which shocked Hannah because she thought Anne was in Switzerland. Hannah had three meetings at the wall with Anne, moments where they were able to talk briefly (not see each other) and share some moments. Hannah eventually found out that Anne died in the camp.

Hannah was liberated from a train and her description was quite hilarious. Someone asked about libertarian and she said, "I can't tell you anything about it because I slept through it (laughter). Someone said the Germans went by with white flags, but I didn't see that either. I woke to the Russians taking us down." The other HILARIOUS part of her story is that they stopped at one town but she didn't get in quickly enough, so all of the houses were gone. The next town, her group of 10 were told they could only take houses with white flags flying because that meant the occupants had fled. They got a big nice house, the mayor's house. Hannah: "And the mayor, he was a biiiiiiiiiiiig Nazi. How do I know? He had light green wallpaper with dark green swastikas. I think that was a little more than enough."

Mr. Frank is actually who came for her and her sister after the war and who helped get them settled in Israel. The Red Cross would post the names of those who survived at the Central Train Station in Amsterdam (yes, this one)

and he found their names and came to find them. He also sent her the first copy of Anne's diary. For years, whenever journalists came to talk to Mr. Frank, he sent them to Hannah. Hannah's husband called Anne his "second wife. " :)

I didn't know that I would have the chance to meet Anne Frank's best friend, to hear her story. To become, in fact a keeper of her story. However, it's not accidental that I added the Amsterdam layover to my trip. It's yet another Providential piece of this experience. To hear Hannah talk about the little girl whose rooms I saw, whose pages I read was just surreal.

As soon as I can figure out why my videos won't post on FB, the blog, OR YouTube, I'll get the full video of her presentation posted.

Keeper of the Stories

So, last week before I left for this trip, I shared a post about my deep instinct to document, to write, to share, to record. I’ve always been a journal-keeper, photo-taker, letter-writer, and now social media-documenter.

The moment that probably captured me most in Yad Vashem was when we were in the Warsaw portion and Ephraim was talking to us about the milk cans. (For those unfamiliar with this story, the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto took it upon themselves to record and document the lives of those living in the ghetto. Then they preserved them in milk cans and buried them. The cans were found years later and provide historical documentation of those in the ghetto.)

This need to preserve is unique to humans, but it is not unique to a certain people group. We want to be remembered. We want our loved ones to be remembered. We all have a story and our individual stories create the story of humankind. He told the story of Simon Dubnow, a Jewish historian who wrote an eight volume history of the Jewish people plus several other books. As he was being lead away to be shot, he turned and yelled, “Juden! Shraybn!” “Jews! Write it down!”

It took my breath away in that moment, but the more time I have reflected on it, the more I have been arrested by those words. His time on this earth was over. But even in that moment, he had the presence of mind to remind those around him to remember. And the only reliable form of memory is documentation.

I always tell my students that I feel a tremendous responsibility to record any and all accounts I hear of Holocaust events so that I can pass them on to the people in my classroom, those around me, the people in my home. In that way, I see myself as a keeper of their stories, the ones who are either already no longer with us or who don’t have much time left on this earth. As I share with my students, THEY become the keeper of the stories as well. It’s how WE are “writing it down”.

And to take all of this one step further, each of the teens in my classroom has a story of his or her own. I want them to feel safe to share their stories through discussion and journaling, to realize the value of their lives and their stories, and to preserve them for future generations. It’s why I type things my kids say into a notes document on my phone, why I share funny things they do on fb, why I spend time blogging, why I have documented every moment of this trip, why I basically typed a transcript into my phone of every word Ephraim said during our museum tour…. To Remember. People! Write it down!

Wednesday Reflections

We had a session yesterday Wednesday afternoon on the antecedents of Holocaust writing. He raised the question of “What’s the point in studying literature?” There were some beautiful answers, and I’ll list them below, but it sounds like a therapeutic Thursday discussion for the 2015-16 AP class to me…….. ;)

Literature enables you to live an existence that’s not really yours.
It brings creativity, innovation and productivity.
Students/people see themselves reflected in literature.
It gives history a face and a name.
If history deals with the masses, literature’s forte is the individual.
Counterpoint to previous: History and literature are irreparably connected.

He also made the following statement, a statement that I find to be so powerful I think I’ll hang it in my classroom: Literature gives a conduit for a vibrant experience for those who have previously felt ostracized and alienated.

Wednesday morning, we toured the historical museum. It was a uniquely personal and emotional experience and, while I am going to sit on most of the factual type stuff I wrote down (which I will be adding to my curriculum), I want to share some of the specific stories Ephraim told us as we toured the facility.

We had an architecture and history lecture from Ephraim as we all sat on little camping stools outside in the courtyard. In discussing what normal life is like in Israel, he told a story about his time in the military. He had a very close friend who was killed during the Yom Kippur War. Ephraim was the one who had to take his buddy’s personal effects to his family. He said he sat in the living room with the parents and that the dad comforted HIM instead of the other way around. The friend’s father was a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire first family in the Holocaust. He married another woman after liberation, they moved to Israel, and started an orphanage for refugee children.

The book burnings of the Nazi era are pretty widely known. And most people are (appropriately) bothered by it, while we bibliophiles are even horrified by it. On Wednesday, though, I heard something that put the book burnings into perspective for anyone, no matter your level of affinity for books. Between the years of 1900 and 1933, 44 Germans won a Nobel Prize. FORTY-FOUR. A NOBEL PRIZE. As Ephraim stated, when a country like that is burning books, something is dramatically wrong.

The story below is one of the sweetest I have ever heard. It's copied and pasted here from a document they sent us after telling us the story.
THE STORY OF CHERUB

The parents - Hanna and Yehuda Hohenstein lived in Berlin with their 7 children. In 1943 the Nazis decided to make Berlin Judenrein-and the Jews were sent to different camps. The Hohenstein's were sent to Terezin- this was a transit camp for many Jews that were deported from Germany and Austria- before they were sent to the death camps.

In Sept. 1943 the father and their 7 children were all sent to the east- to Auschwitz. Hana remained in Terezin-not knowing that she was pregnant with number #8.

In 1944 she was sent to a concentration camp in Germany- Buchenwald.

In April 1944 she gave birth in this camp to a baby boy. She desperately wanted him to survive and she convinced one of the guards to take him out of the camp and place her little baby on a pile of dead bodies- hoping that maybe someone would pass by- hear the cries of a little baby and pick him up and save him. She wrapped up her little son in rags and tied a small piece of cloth around his little wrist with her number inscribed on it. This was his only identification.

A priest walked by and heard the cries of a small baby- he picked him up and took him back to the monastery. They named this little boy- CHERUB- a little Angel-

There he grew up for the next 5 years.

Meanwhile both Hana and Yehuda had survived the Holocaust- together with 2 of their 7 children that were sent to Auschwitz.

Hana was ill and in a hospital in Switzerland- she begged her husband to return to Germany and to Buchenwald and to the villages and monasteries in that area.

He listened to his wife.

He returned to the area of Buchenwald and searched for his son- he finally happened onto one monastery- there the Priest told him that they had sheltered 3 Jewish children- 2 had come with identification- and one- they found as a little baby- they knew nothing about him.

The only identification they had was a small piece of rag with a number inscribed on it that was wrapped around his wrist.

He asked to see the rag with the number- .......................it was his wife's number from Buchenwald!!!!

He reunited with his son- they reunited with his wife and settled in back in Germany in 1950.

The parents gave him a new name- Joshua- Yehoshua- in Hebrew.

In 1962- when Joshua turned 18 years old- they decided to send him to Israel in order that he should meet a Jewish partner - marry and create a family in the Jewish state.

He lives today in Givatiym- outside of Tel Aviv- is married and has children.

This is one Holocaust story with a semi-happy ending.

Tuesday - anti-Semitism

Tuesday consisted of 8 hours of lectures on anti-Semitism. It covered history from the ancient world to the modern one.

My very favorite Tuesday session was the last one on Intellectuals and anti-Semitism in the Modern World. He allowed a question and answer session at the end and it was so very interesting. One thing that he stated that I would like to use in class discussion, and something people frequently ask me about, is what makes the Holocaust unique as compared to other genocides. His answer (and I'm not 100% I agree with all of it, but that's what will make it great for students to analyze):
1. the fanaticism leading up to the genocide
2. the racist/religious approaches
3. an established hatred that was worldwide
4. the intensity of the destruction
5. the speed of the destruction

Tuesday night we got to go on a tour of the Western Wall tunnels. This is something the girls and Kraig and I didn't get to do, so I was really excited and it was truly an incredible feeling, to be underneath the modern world and so much closer to the historical one. I loved the thread that connected the history presented in the day's sessions with the very real physical world.

It was also fun to do something with our entire group and be able to spend some time getting to know people.

Monday~ Making it Personal, Buses, Views, and STARS

Our first full day of the seminar addressed "God, Jews, and History" and "The Educational Philosophy of the International School for Holocaust Studies". After that, we spent the afternoon on a six hour bus tour of Jerusalem. A couple of takeaways from yesterday detailed below:

Regarding educational philosophy, I was very relieved to hear many of the basic tenants of my own philosophy enumerated. Steffy had some incredible quotes from her discussion yesterday that I wanted to share specifically.

 "Holocaust wasn’t about 11 million. It was about 11 million worlds. All of those people had families and connections, potential." This is EXACTLY the message we try to pass forward when we attempt to emphasize the personal in Holocaust Literature. The ramifications were so much farther-reaching than just the people immediately impacted by the specific events.

She also told a story of an Auschwitz survivor who was faced with a moral decision in Auschwitz. Steffy made the statement that "Long before Ruth Brand went to Auschwitz, she knew who she was, what she stood for, what she believed, and who she wanted to be. Our students can learn that through Holocaust education. In the moment of temptation/weakness isn’t the moment to decide who you are. If you don’t know that before, there’s a good chance you’re going to make a decision you aren't comfortable with." JUST WOW. This is such a great point for teenagers and middle schoolers who are so often at the crossroads of making those decisions that will establish their moral codes. I absolutely LOVED that comment she made.

Our afternoon consisted of that bus tour with the most phenomenal views of Jerusalem. We drove all the way around the city and saw it from four vantage points all around. As we did this, Ephraim explained the history of the country including maps and neighborhood explanations. In a country (and city) with such a complex history, this was so very informative. He discussed the ancient times, the establishment of the country and borders by the UN, the War for Independence, through the 60's and up to more recent times. Our last stop was to Samuel's Tomb (maybe, which tends to be a common word here when visiting historic sites, haha!). We climbed to the top of the mosque and were able to have the most amazing 360 degree view of the city. There was a brisk wind blowing and it was truly picturesque and memorable.

Last night, I found myself alone (my roommate had some people to meet for dinner associated with her grant), so I decided to walk to a little restaurant in Mamila Mall, next to the Jaffa Gate. I ended up eating outside at a little Italian piazza-style cafe, twinkly lights overhead, red-checked tablecloth, Old City walls to my right, and a group Jewish dance taking place on the mall below. Just. Plain. Surreal. :) I loved it and my leisurely stroll back. As I stated in my instagram caption, "Jerusalem, you wear the night so well."