Sunday, April 29, 2012

Standing in the Shadows of the Holocaust

I remember watching a documentary about the American Neo-Nazi rally in Skokie, Illinois in the late 1970s being very touched by the reactions of Holocaust survivors who vehemently opposed the march. I could see the shadows of their decades old horror in their eyes as they protested what they said was a familiar echo of the cycle of hatred reconstituting itself unimaginably once again in their lifetime. Even as an insulated eighteen year old, I could feel their pain, recognized the efficacy of their admonitions, could see the foundation of hatred trying to set itself, trying to harden and cure in front of my very eyes. I wasn't pro Palestinian, wasn't pro Israeli, probably wasn't pro anything at that point. But I could sort out the rhetoric of evil, could perceive the mechanisms of hate, could feel the chilling penumbra that would chase away the light.
Thirty years later, I would stand in those very shadows that I had gleaned in the eyes of those survivors all those years before. The fragmented and jagged shadows that ripped across my shirt as I walked up to the gates of the barbed-wired enshrouded refugee camp inside Jerusalem, heading into streets heaped in garbage, and into schools with virtually no resources warning the promise of the classrooms. The darker, humiliating shadows inside the covered street just outside the Mosque of Al-Aqsa, where a young man in a earth toned uniform held an automatic weapon carelessly as he forced me to recite Koran in a language he disdained, knowing no matter what I did, he was going to refuse me entry and insult the woman at my side just because he could. And the shadows that literally dwarfed and engulfed me as I stood at the base of the wall built in Bethlehem, a drab and forbidding structure obscuring the setting sun, marring it profanely in a place that others found holy, foreshadowing the barren and lifeless shell of Hebron that lay on the other side. A city draped in desolate and empty shadows, the scars of hatred and division.
I suppose I can understand how these shadows look to a new generation of Jews, maybe they are the necessities of security and the bleak under girding of a defiant survival in an age where austere strength subjugates virtue. I can understand this. But what about the eyes of their parents, their grandparents? What do they see in these shadows? No familiar ghosts? No portents of a race poised to lose its soul in the death of another? Not one cry, not one protest, not one shudder?
I have stood in the shadows of the Holocaust, but not in Germany or Poland - they have radiated malignantly to a land bereft of clouds, towering trees, or imposing mountains, nothing now but hate to hide the sun.

I have employed this metaphor before, a reference to the Holocaust that gathered some indignant rebuttal. I have been informed, in no uncertain terms, that I hold no claim to this term, that it is owned by others. But when those custodians overlook these shadows, when they can no longer see the brooding evil lingering there, they have bartered away their tenure in a profane and pragmatic bargain.

4 comments:

  1. Nicely written Michael. (As always).

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  2. Kind words from a kind heart, thank you very much!

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  3. I wish you would elaborate more on the day to day living conditions of the Palestinians living in Israel or even the indignities suffered at the hand of the Israeli Military Police to visiting foreigners. Many of us haven't been, nor will ever get the chance to visit. Others, like myself, refuse to visit under these humiliating conditions that you've touched upon! The media is always expressing the Israeli/Jewish perspective, yet very few communicate the Palestinian Arab perspective.. and even fewer of those people can be trusted to communicate the Arab perspective. You, sir, can be trusted!

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  4. Thank you :) You know everytime I visit Jordan or Palestine and go into schools, I am haunted by the innocent smiles of the children, fearing a future that will slowly try to kill the softness in their souls.

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