Judaism Does Not Equal The Holocaust

Credit: Museum Treblinka

Previously, I wrote on The Thread in anticipation of my Neshama (soul) journey to Poland. I had a naive idea of this experience as a journey into a sacred past, a connection to my heritage, and an opportunity for personal and ancestral healing. I took this trip with Nicole and a group of similarly minded modern Jewish women who were also looking to find themselves by reaching into the past; the dark memory that is World War II Poland, death camps, the cleaning of a cemetery, and the lost Jewish communities that once were populated by our ancestors. It was a noble crusade but ultimately, not remotely the journey I expected.

In short, Poland is a magnificent country with many remnants of its Jewish past still evident in some areas. Clearing the old Jewish cemetery Zawiercie was a rewarding experience.

We visited two death camps in Poland: Treblinka and Auschwitz.

Treblinka is a terrible and fascinating place. When the Nazis fled, they burned everything to the ground. There is nothing left of the original structure - the barracks, the gas chambers, ovens, all of it is gone. What you see, after stepping through the other side of a giant metal gate-like structure, is a field of green grass surrounded by a new-growth forest that appeared sometime in the 1960’s.

Beyond the grass is a huge field of constructed jagged granite stones growing up from the landscape like an anguished graveyard, which it is. At its center is a giant stone monolith. This is a place that demands silence and deep introspection. I found it haunting and beautiful. Nearly two million people were murdered here, mostly Jews, including my great-grandparents Ignaz and Sali Winkler.

Ignaz and Sali Winkler, my great-grandparents

At Auschwitz, the feeling was different. We arrived like many others did, in a giant tour bus. There were ticket booths and crowd control ropes. I stood in a long line of women all waiting to use the bathroom while the men all easily ducked in and out of theirs. This was my first up-close impression of the infamous death camp where dozens of cousins from my Grandma Ricki’s extended family were murdered, and our great-Aunt Hermina was liberated.

It all felt so wrong, like I was entering a rock concert or a festival. It made me wonder, why am I here? Is this pilgrimage necessary to understand the Holocaust? Are we learning anything, or are we simply voyeurs? Why do we consider a journey to the death camps so important? Surely there are better ways to honor our ancestors than being tourists at the sites where they were murdered.

Judaism does not equal the Holocaust: Many adults and young people are told that their education is not complete without a trip to the camps. It creates a perception that Holocaust is the main characteristic of Judaism and our past. Perhaps we need to reconsider our relationship to these places and ask ourselves, how we can move forward into the future when we are dragging the deaths of the past with us?

Remember how your ancestors lived: It is of course without a doubt that we need to remember. We need to learn our histories and tell the stories of our ancestors. We need to understand how they lived and what was important to them. For many of us, our lineages are lost to time and tragedy. We owe it to ourselves to find them. (I only learned the names Sali and Ignaz very recently). But when we do, we ultimately find ourselves and a way to step forward into a future not tethered by death and destruction.

Death camp tourism is reductionist at best: I am not saying that it wasn’t interesting visiting the camps, but there are aspects of the Holocaust we have unwittingly turned into an industry. Auschwitz has become the number one tourist attraction in Poland. The intentions were good - to educate, to warn, but is it succeeding? It is telling that Treblinka doesn’t fare as well as a tourist attraction. As one TripAdvisor reviewer named zippy808 from Arizona said, “Not much to see here. Don’t put it at the top of your list.”