Yom HaShoah

It must have been about ten years ago or more that I shared my birthday with Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day. I remember clearly getting in the car and driving downtown, upset that my birthday couldn’t be a day of joy and celebration. All those years ago, I had no idea that one day I would be studying in Paris and working at the Mémorial de la Shoah. That one day I would touch deportation lists, fake IDs, love letters, family photos, and testimonies from people who lived through this tragedy. And now, many years later, on the cusp of my birthday, I am remembering the Shoah in a city that had an active role in the systematic killing of Jewish communities.

Last night, I went to the ceremony for Yom HaShoah at the Mémorial, a unique experience that comes with my internship here. I heard testimonies and saw candles of remembrance lit, and then I heard the reading of the names. For over two hours, I stood in silence as pages and pages of names were read. I didn’t allow myself to sit down out of respect. In my synagogue in Charleston, we stand for Mourner’s Kaddish as a community on Shabbat- in honor of loved ones, to support those who stand, and to stand for those who do not have anyone to stand for them- including the six million Jews that perished in the Holocaust. So I stood for those two hours for all those people who had no one to stand for them, whose entire families were wiped out by hatred and intolerance. And after those two hours, it was announced that we would be taking a five-minute break and continuing with the reading of the names. I was shocked- how many more names were there to be read? I got my hands on a program, and what I read froze me: they read the names of deported Jews, of people who died during the resistance, of people who died saving Jews, of everyone for 24 hours. There are so many names that it takes them an entire day to commemorate all of them. They were reading names- remembering lives taken, futures lost, hopes and dreams and love and laughter stolen- when I left work yesterday and were still reading them when I came back this morning.

In the past six weeks or so that I have been working at the Mémorial, I have grown a lot, not only professionally and academically, but also emotionally. I am an American Jew whose family was untouched by the Holocaust, with my grandparents growing up in America and in Israel. I am an American Jew who has grown up with the ability to practice my religion freely and not be persecuted for it. I am an American Jew who has grown up in a country that has an outsider’s view of the Holocaust. “Oh, that was something that happened in countries so far away, in places and languages and cultures that we don’t understand.” But here, in Paris, the story is not the same, and that is very clear.

I should have known that what I learned from working at the Mémorial de la Shoah would stay with me even after I left work each evening- the emotional toll that working in the archives takes on me is a heavy one. Some days are harder than others, but the work that I do here haunts me. I walk along the Seine in the mornings and think about how empty the streets must have been during the occupation. I handle deportation lists, with thousands of names listed, and I think about how much Jewish life was lost. I have had nightmares of my family in hiding, of the SS coming to my house and taking us away, and of not being able to save my family when they needed me. What I feel from working here is only a fraction of what must have been felt by the people that lived in fear. During the reading of the names last night, one woman stopped in the middle of her list. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m just so emotional. Listening to all these names, it just makes you crazy. It’s madness.” And it is. I wonder if there will ever be a day where I can talk about my experiences at the Mémorial and not want to burst into tears.

Six million. A number so big that I will never be able to picture it in my mind. I read a statistic that said that if we were to have a moment of silence for every Jew killed in the Shoah, we would be silent for 11.5 years. Today at the Mémorial, we remember what happened here, in this city, and I am overwhelmed for the first time by the closeness of the Shoah. I love living in Paris, and I’m thankful that I was given the opportunity to study here. But today I think about the Jews who lived in Paris but never had the opportunities I have- to live peacefully, to spend a birthday in such a beautiful place, to see the first blue sky of the season, to not have to hide, to get an education, to have had a Bat Mitzvah, to think about a Jewish future, to be able to practice my religion freely. To not be persecuted. To be treated with respect. To feel safe even in a world of hatred.

Today, we remember.

#april