Yom HaShoah - Remembrance of the Holocaust

We live in a part of Queens where the observance of Jewish holy days are noticeable, even if you are goyim and/or don't have an eye on the calendar. I hadn't been too deep into the public fray when I posted yesterday morning. And after running errands and noticing some religiously minded men out and about, I came home to check out the many web-sites helpful to intellectually curious people, like me - someone who "married in" to The Tribe, but whose spouse is decidedly assimilationist and unplugged from the shul long ago.

5/5/5 was also the Day of Remembrance this year -- it shifts according to the lunar-based Jewish calendar -- and follows so close between the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of the Dachau death camp (April 29, 1945) and the surrender of the Germans to Allied Forces and VE Day (May 8, 1945) as to make this historian notice the synchronicity in her mental file. (See also the provocation of a new Deutsche papa to my new bloggishness!)

Dachau, the first of the death camps established, initially for political prisoners, is a place I have visited. It is not far outside Munich, and in 1988, after a semester abroad at the School for Irish Studies in Dublin, a small group of us travelling on the continent sojourned out to pay our respects. It was December, cold and gray, and quite possibly the day after Pan Am 103 went down over Lockerbie Scotland with 50+ study-abroad juniors like ourselves travelling home for Christmas; a friend from Pennsylvania, Scott Saunders, perished in that bombing.

Modern traumas notwithstanding, the historical weight of visiting one of the Kamps is not to be underestimated. The psychic shock of being in such a place was overwhelming. After just a few minutes of walking the grounds, I began to hear my name echoing. Not quite in my head, but in the sound of pebbles underfoot, and in the wind, and from a far away place. Rachel, mother of the tribe, Jacob's beloved. Rachel of Ramah, crying for her children, unconsolable. Rachel, my daughter. Rachel, my sister. Rachel! Ruchel! Ruchelah!!!

At age 20.5, walking the grounds of Dachau, unkowingly untethered from familiar reality, the membrane between conscious awareness and the collective Unconscious had grown thin.

I sought out sacred ground to quell the spirits. To a temple with an eternal flame, but the gates were closed. To an ecumenical, United Nations-ish memorial, but it was cold and forbidding, not much solace. And then, blessedly, to a Carmelite convent church, on the edge of the grounds, which I stumbled into half-mad with grief and the uncontrolled channelling of psychic pain that was mine and not mine and everyone's at the same "time." You walk through an old guard tower into the monastic grounds, and the transition, for me, was perceptible. As if angels had folded their wings around me and I could breathe again, surrounded by air made purer with prayer and sacrifices of a different order.

As the great soul Elie Wiesel points out in an interview about the controversial religious sites at Auschwitz, in fact Dachau was a KZ for all sorts of dissenters, and many Jewish prisoners were sent further East to their deaths. But I did not grasp that distinction at the time. And still, the unevolved human capacity for genocide remains a terror for us all regardless of caste, creed, ethnicity, or political belief.

What, of all this, might our new German pope, whose faith took its formation in the cauldron of such a war, bring from it to bear on the future of this world?