The Tidal Wave

What makes murder so heinous is that it is not just a crime against the victim, but against everyone connected to the victim, not to mention all the possibilities that person's future may have held. Every loss, from any cause of death creates a ripple, bringing pain, loss and unforeseen consequences to an unpredictable chain of people.

When murder becomes mass murder, the ripple becomes a wave – and scaled large enough, a tidal wave that wreaks untold and often unquantifiable devasatation.

Israel was born in the path of the tidal wave of the Holocaust.  In 1947 and 1948 as Israel struggled for its statehood and then survival against multiple Arab armies, Israel's leadership was also fighting for Britain to lift its naval blockade and allow Holocaust survivors safe passage to Israel. If the Antisemitism of 19th Century Europe was a catalyst for Zionism and Jewish settlement of Palestine, the Holocaust was the proof that Jewish leaders were all too sad to have that a Jewish state was necessary. In the end, the Jewish refugee problem in Europe tipped the United Nations over the edge to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. 

Thus is in order to understand Israel, its culture and politics, you have to understand Holocaust. If "taxation without representation" and "all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights" are the foundation stones of the United States, "Never again" and "We will forgive, but never forget" are Israel's.

Accordingly, the Israeli equivalent to the Smithsonian is Yad Vashem – the Holocaust museum which is really an entire complex covering most of a mountainside. Yad Vashem's power comes from not just commemorating events and historical facts, but creating multiple incredibly considered experiences to help the visitor understand the tidal wave of devastation. If you can leave Yad Vashem without having your guts wrenched, your heart pulled out of your chest and your soul crushed – then you're a sociopath.

Very smartly, Israel practically requires all visiting foreign dignitaries to visit Yad Vashem. Because before a foreign leader can have a meaningful dialog with Israel, he or she needs to understand Israel's perspective – even essence. Again, that is rooted in Holocaust and its aftermath.

Emily and I last visited Yad Vashem in August 2010. Of course it was moving and powerful. For Emily it brought up a lot of questions she wished she could ask her dad and grandparents. This time, she had her dad right there with her – and before she asked, he was able to take the information at Yad Vashem and from Dina, our guide – and apply it to their family. Emily's grandparents, great grandmother and great uncles were survivors. Her father grew up a child of survivors. Yad Vashem is her family story.

Just as importantly, it's Bailey's family story. Seeing everything at Yad Vashem could take weeks – and just to look at every item in every exhibit within the main historical museum could take 12 hours or more. So Dina tailored a tour just for Bailey – focusing on the experiences of young people who were Holocaust victims. Amazingly, Bailey is the same age her great grandparents were when Germany invaded Poland and their nightmare began – so there was an extra opportunity to relate and understand.

The experience seemed engaging and meaningful to Bailey. Growing up, Holocaust was a major focus of my Jewish education and was brought into my secular education by sixth grade. I was growing up closer to the wake of the tidal wave. Bailey has no foundation in Holocaust or WWII history and this was really her first formal exposure. It clearly had an emotional impact.

For Emily and me – especially me – Yad Vashem was a different experience this time. "Having children ruins everything," I told Emily as I found myself fighting to keep my composure. Unlike her, most of my family – including all of my great grandparents – came to America as part of the Ellis Island wave of immigration in the early 1900's. The few Holocaust stories or survivors in my family were distant relatives. My great grandparents left the Antisemitism of Europe behind them and that experience was as far as possible away from me. So Yad Vashem was powerful, but not so directly personal.

Sennen and Ailyn changed all that. Hearing a story of a survivor turning up to center helping to reunite parents and children and receiving only his baby daughter's bib, it's hard not to imagine what would happen if that had been Ailyn. I watched a video of a woman from Russia telling her story about how Nazis dug a pit in her village, forced all the Jews to strip, lined them up at the edge of the pit and then shot them all with their machine guns. She was among the last to line up. She was shot and fell into the pit, landing on mostly dead bodies, with screams coming from below from those were who were not killed – and she sat up, alive on a pile of the dead, dying and injured. Then she said she was seven years old at the time – and despite trying not to, my mind jumped to Sennen and I felt a battering ram hit my gut and I cried. 

As my friend Leanne has said many times. nothing makes you more vulnerable than having children.

Afterward, I thought about what makes the Holocaust stand out beyond other ethnic conflicts and genocides of the modern era. Because make no mistake about it, there are plenty – many still going on (Rohingya in Myanmar and Uighurs in China come to mind) and as a world, we still don't do enough.

The differences I see are three: 1. The Holocaust happened among first world, Western nations – which shocks especially shocks us. 2. It was so planned, considered and systematized. In other words, it's not a crime of passion or raw barbarism. 3. It was brought onto other countries' soil.

British comedian Eddie Izzard summed the last point up best:

"And he [Hitler] was a mass-murdering fuckhead, as many important historians have said. But there were other mass murderers that got away with it! Stalin killed many millions, died in his bed, well done there; Pol Pot killed 1.7 million Cambodians, died under house arrest at age 72, well done indeed! And the reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we're sort of fine with that. “Ah, help yourself,” you know? “We've been trying to kill you for ages!” So kill your own people, right on there. Seems to be… Hitler killed people next door… “Oh… stupid man!” After a couple of years, we won't stand for that, will we?"

But whatever the reasons, differences and explanations, Yad Vasehem reminds us that we have the responsibility not just to never forget, but to prevent. And moreover, that if we won't, Israel will strive to.

Golda Meir summarized the Israeli viewpoint well when she said, "We owe a responsibility not only to those who are in Israel but also to those generations that are no more, to those millions who have died within our lifetime, to Jews all over the world, and to generations of Jews to come. We hate war. We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown, and when strawberries bloom in Israel."

Moreover, Golda perhaps more than any Israeli Prime Minister was influenced by Holocaust in valuing life, "I have given instructions that I be informed every time one of our soldiers is killed, even if it is in the middle of the night. When President Nasser leaves instructions that he is to be awakened in the middle of the night if an Egyptian soldier is killed, there will be peace."