(no subject)

I have a bad habit. When a factual story about the Holocaust comes on the TV, or is newly printed on the web, I go absorb it. It's a very bad habit. I watch the screen, listen to the words, and sometimes I feel it all wash over me, into me. I feel a snippet of the horror of the Holocaust. I feel the pain of the Jews who were made to work as slaves once again, as on the pyramids of the Pharaoh, long ago and far away, but in some curious measure forced to relive the time in bondage that defined the Israelites as a people. But the Holocaust, this was a different kind of servitude. This was a man working in a Volkswagon plant for no wages, forced to manufacture vehicles used to keep himself and his family in chains. There was a woman who fiddled for her captors while her little brother burned, his body an emaciated pile of bones and skin robbed of what human dignity should have been there for three score and ten at the age of fourteen. Millions of stories, some more dramatic, some less so, but not many lived to tell the tales. My rabbi from my synagogue, growing up, had a set of numbers tattooed on his arm. My parents told me the significance of it in my teens, but the true scope of it took time to sink in. His father, his mother, his siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles - all gone. He is a very mild man, a very wise man, and I do my best to listen to him now when I have the opportunity. When I was little I fell asleep during his weekly holding forth from the bimah, but he wasn't allowed to speak his full mind by the shul Brotherhood. I hope there are copies of later weeks talks, I found him much more interesting as an older teenager and a young man.

There was a Holocaust story this past Sunday on 60 minutes. I hadn't known it was one of the stories until I got to it, and I made sure to keep it on. I didn't want to get too absorbed in it, but I felt myself drawn in, drawn back to a past of pain, a pain that some of my relatives endured over sixty years ago, a pain that some of them didn't survive. I don't like feeling that pain, but I find myself going to it even so. Maybe it's a reminder that I am still alive. Maybe Germany in World War Two was the new Egypt, one with guns, germs and steel, its science as strong as the Pharaoh's sorcerers. This time salvation came in the form of millions of troops, pulled together in common cause, none of them expecting what they found when they arrived at the camps.

I watched the story, about a camp made over to perpetrate a Nazi fraud, a fraud to keep the world at large from knowing that so many Jews, among others, were being casually, coldly slaughtered. They visited a group of women who performed a play back then in the concentration camp, over sixty years ago, and I tried to keep it in the background while I paid attention to the computer, a wonderfully distracting device. I failed, and I listened, and I watched. And the tears came to my eyes, tears of pain and sorrow. I didn't blink them back, nor did they fall, but they were there. They glistened in the dark, where no one could see them and only I could feel them. The tears are gone, but the heartache... well, that will die back down by the morning.

One thing I do know, though: I like to help people and make things better. This is something that can never be made better until it is forgotten, yet it should never be forgotten. There have been other genocides, before and since, and I deplore all of them, and yet this one strikes me so hard. If it was just a matter of ancestry then my heart would quail when I listen to the whims of Joseph Stalin in Russia, or the Pharaoh back in the old days of Egypt, but it doesn't. Most other genocides, I feel upset and angry. This one, above all others, makes me weep for something I've lost that I don't think I've ever had in the first place.

These are my thoughts in the still of the night.