Yad VaShem - A Place and a Name

Ok. Quick update. First off, for people like my mom who are getting worried about me being over here right now - seriously - things are okay where I am as of yet. If things change, I'll come home. At this point, I am considering abandoning the initial plan to stay on two more weeks and travel a bit. Most of the places I want to go aren't safe. Haifa has had some bombings. Tiberias, Capernaum, and the Sea of Galilee area are being hit with rockets...so, I don't think it would be wise to go anywhere North of here. Now, South? That's the Negev. A big ol' desert. Not really anxious to go there. Eilat, the very tip of the South? Nice beaches, dolphin sanctuaries, etc. etc...but again, nothing I absolutely have to see. About the only place I'd care to spend some time is Tel Aviv, but I could forego even that. I'll be going to Jaffo and Tel Aviv on a day trip this Tuesday anyway. This Thursday and Friday, I'm going to Massada. As much as I really do like it here, I would like to be home. I miss it.

The other day I went to Yad VaShem, the holocaust museum here. It was a really nice museum - only a year or so old. But hold onto your seats for a classic weird story from the stranger-than-fiction life of Sam...

Back when I lived in Germany, I went to visit a few of the concentration camps. One of the camps I went to was in Poland - Majdanek - which is about a kilometer just outside the center city of Lublin. The camp wasn't really a formal museum at the time and most of it had been left untouched over the years. There wasn't a guide, nor were there little placards to explain what we were seeing. We just wandered about a run down concentration camp. There were still rooms of shoes and personal effects from the people taken there - still heaps of ashes in the krematoria. Definately not like Dachau near Munich where things are "restored" to sterility befitting a museum.

There was a point during our informal unguided wanderings of the camp where my friend Ellen and I sat on a twisted piece of metal (see picture above) on the edge of the woods on the periphery of the camp. It was kind of lodged in the dirt among weeds under some pine trees. We had no clue what it was, just that it looked strange and kind of rocked like a see-saw when we sat on it.

(Yes, we were see-sawing in a concentration camp. Don't judge. It's a weird place to be - when you take pictures standing next to a sign that says "Krematoria" do you pose and smile? look sadly at the ground with your hands in your pockets? stare contemplatively off into the distance? Yeah. There isn't really a protocol for such a circumstance. It's just odd all the way around. You find yourself yawning in a spot near a wall with bulletholes in it or your tummy grumbling beneath tree with only one limb left and you wonder...what happened here and why in the eerie shadow of man's darkest moments in history do I feel hungry - bored? So, to break the awkward displacement of your soul while standing on earth hallowed by another's torturous death and feeling little difference between that spot and any other where you might have a picnic, what do you do? Naturally, you see-saw on the piece of twisted metal before you. Naturally.)

OK, back to the story...

After returning to the states from my year in Germany, my family and I went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC when I was visiting prospective colleges of which the American University in DC was one. The museum was still new then and somewhere among the exhibits there, with a halo of halogen, was this same piece of funky metal on display. I remember being really shocked to see it again. It's certainly not the kind of thing you expect to develop an on-going relationship with - yet there it was like a kitten that followed you home.

Finally, I got a proper introduction. A little plaque to the side explained what it was, and to paraphrase, it was a truck chassis which was used as an impromptu grill to burn remaining bodies with when news told of camps westward being liberated. Had I known, I probably wouldn't have seed and sawed on it.

Anyway, one transatlantic reunion with such an artifact was certainly a bit odd. Now - years after - I met up with my metal friend once again, here at Yad VaShem in Jerusalem! As soon as I saw it about a hundred yards off from where we entered the Toblerone Bar shaped museum hall, it was like spotting an old highschool buddy. I grabbed my roommate and told him - "When we get to that thing, if the sign on it says it's from Majdanek, I'm going to have a story to tell you." Sure enough...

It's things like that that make me suspect that under all the seeming chaos, Life, at least my life has a rhythm - an order - a purpose. And if mine, then all. How else could one account for such synchronicities?

After that, we went to Mount Hertzl where many famous Israeli leaders are burried - it's like the Arlington National Cemetery of Israel. We saw the tomb of Yitzchak Rabin who was assasinated by a right-wing extremist Jew at a peace rally in 1995. We also saw the graves of Golda Meir and Theodor Hertzl among others. Very interesting. Then we sat on the grass and listened to a young (25) Israeli read some emotional things he wrote the day Rabin was assasinated. Very moving.

Um...not much besides.