Memory is a concept. Remembrance is an action. 

In November this year, I joined a trip alongside a delegation of Jewish teens from across Switzerland on a trip to Poland to learn about the Shoah. Since that moment, I haven’t been able to properly reflect on what I saw while I was there before this. This introspection wasn’t difficult to bring about because of the pain I felt while thinking about it; it was impossible because I was consumed by the fear that we could forget what we lost.

When I reflect on my time in Poland, I vividly see myself standing amongst the delegation of my peers in Switzerland. It was a cold afternoon, not tons of wind but enough to make me clench my teeth. We walked slowly into the site of the Treblinka death camp. Consumed by silence, the only life that felt real was that of the people around me as we looked around to bare trees and grey skies. Walking in, the first thing you see are train tracks wider than my wingspan that stretch far down the path and into the trees ahead. As we walk down that path and turn to an opening, you see nothing but one structure standing over the field and headstones scattered around the field. 

What I expected to see were buildings, small brick houses, a long path, and a mini city built to destroy my people. But what I saw was the exact opposite. No rooms, no towers, no gates or fences. Across the field, the only sign of life stood stone faces representing each city and village that was once a thriving Jewish community. 

In Treblinka, you can’t see the destruction. Each building of the Nazis death camp was dismantled. To try to begin to understand it, you have to imagine it. You have to picture the cruelty, the pain, and the loss. We were asked, when standing there, to try to do that. In reflection, we were meant to understand the inconceivable erasure of our history. 

Before leaving, as rain began coming down, we read a poem: 

​Go to Treblinka
keep your eyes wide open
sharpen your hearing
stop your breathing
and listen to the voices which emerge
from every grain of that earth –

Go to Treblinka
They are waiting there for you
They long to the voice of your life
to the sign of your existence,
to the pace of your feet
to human look understanding and remembering
to caress of love over their ashes –

Go to Treblinka
go by your own free will
go by the power of pain over the horror which has happened
from the depth of understanding and the aching heart which has not accepted –
listen to them there with all your senses!

Go to Treblinka
there the green silence, golden or white
which embrace Them each season of the year
will tell you stories of the stories
about life which became forbidden and impossible –

Go to Treblinka
watch how time has stopped there
listen to the standing time, to the dead thundering silence
and to the human stones weeping

- Halina Birenbaum

In that place, you are surrounded by the reason we must remember. Sure, you can close your eyes and pretend you are not where you are, but when you inevitably open them, you see the hollowness of loss. It is natural to want to distance ourselves from that pain, but we must understand our history so we can see how it affects our present communities.

In spending time across Europe in November, I had a realization that I had never understood before then. Communities across Europe are still reeling from the erasure of the Shoah 80 years later. Many communities were completely decimated. Not a trace of their synagogues, cemeteries, or customs. And the many ones that are still here are still smaller than they were before the Shoah. Many of the communities across Europe are home to a handful of Survivors to share their stories, and importantly, to tell them. 

We are the last generation that will interact with survivors of the Shoah together. We are the last generation that will hear their testimonies and see the person behind the story. That is why today, on Yom Hashoah, we must recommit to carrying on the legacies of those who came before us. Go listen to someone's story online and then go tell it. Go read books about what happened and share what you are learning with those around you. One day, go see the camps and then share with people what you saw.

On this Yom HaShoah, we remember the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. Not 6 million as a monolith, but each person, story by story, memory by memory.

On this Yom HaShoah, memory must not be passive because remembrance must be active.

Fraternally,
Aleph Logan Reich
101st Grand Aleph Godol