...That We Might Remember

Soon after the joy of Passover comes the solemn observance of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day. It is a difficult time for all Jews. Confronting the shoah poses many challenges. It is a particularly conflicting observance for Jew-by-Choice. We have come to the community with no personal connection to that horrific time in history. How are we to deal with that part of the heritage with which we have aligned ourselves?

One day a few years ago my wife and I visited a friend who lived not far from our home. I knew that she had been in the camps, but on this day the reality of her past literally stared me in the face. For the first time, I saw the numbers on her arm. I was stunned. She was just a sweet, elderly lady. She was a gracious hostess, a kind, gentle soul. How could she have been treated in so inhuman a manner as she must have been in that camp?

With a heavy heart and a troubled soul, I came home and wrote the following piece. It is fiction but it gives expression to my emotions after having confronted the harsh reality of the Shoah for the first time. May Hashem grant that we may all soon merit the coming of Moshiach and that we will know only goodness and joy. Thus may it be G-d's will. Amen.

389146

          I can still see them, clearly as if they were in front of me now.  Six tiny numbers.  O­­rdinary Arabic numerals.  389146…  Distinct and precise as they were when they were needled onto her arm sixty five years before.  A cold, dehumanizing label.  Can I ever forget them?  God knows I want to!  I want to remember the sweet, lovely old woman who wore those numbers, her gentle smile, the distant look in her grey eyes.  But they are always there, those damn numbers.  I pray that I could wash them from my memory but my prayer goes unanswered.  They are etched in my mind as surely as they were on the old lady’s arm.  389146. 
          I knew that there were numbers.  In classes, memorial services, Yom Kippur sermons, I heard about them.  Like vague mnemonic devices, they recall facts from the past.  The trains, the camps, the “showers,” the ovens.  Hitler, Himmler, Mengele, Eichmann.  Treblinka, Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz.  The trains are gone, the criminals dead, the towns memorials to crimes done long ago, the numbers lifeless…  Not so!  I saw them… There on her arm… Cursing, obscene, vile numbers… 389146.
          She never spoke of them, the numbers.  Not a word.  She went about her life as if there were no numbers at all.  She walked to the store every Thursday, came to shul on Shabbos, tended her flower bed and waved to the neighbor children as they rode their bicycles down her street.  She paid the numbers no heed.  But they were there, six digits staring at a busy world that cared not a damn about the numbers or the woman who carried them with her everywhere.  389146.
          She was so unlike the numbers, this woman.  Warm and kind, she always brought me lemonade when I came to visit.  “Come, sit,” she would say.  “I bring you something to drink.”  Two crystal glasses each with two fresh-squeezed lemons and plenty of ice.  Always she sat in the same comfortable chair and smiled.  Then she would raise her glass to drink.  And the numbers appeared surrounding the glow of the woman’s righteous purity with an evil darkness.  389146.
          She died alone one warm summer day, no husband to mourn her, no children to honor her memory.  So on this warm summer day, I rise to say Kaddish for her – my friend with the numbers on her arm.  I remember her – the woman who planted flowers, who smiled at children, who made me lemonade.  I remember.  I must remember.  For she was Gretchen Weiss, not 389146.

Related Links:
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