In early 1973, a few months before he died, my grandfather Abraham Ravinsky opened for the last time a old, yellowing, musty smelling photo album.
“You see this one, Joey?” he said, pointing to a picture of a child. “He was killed by Hitler.”
Then he’d point to a group shot of family members, all wiped out “by Hitler.” This man who had survived the Czar’s pogroms in Russia, and gotten to the U.S. right the Communists (who he hated) took power later learned that many of his beloved, left-behind relatives had been murdered by the Nazis or died in concentration camps. But his beloved wife Rose, and daughters Ruth, Anne and Helen were safe in the U.S. and he raised his family here.
My grandfather NEVER forgot what happened – and on that day he was again making sure I would never forget as he opened his memory book, glanced at it, then looked at my face to see if it registered, his Spencer Tracy-like face capped by a head of pure white hair then turning to find yet another page to show me with more photos of human beings whose lives were wiped out because of the utlimate act of political and racial demonization.
In Israel yesterday, a special museum was opened. It commemorates the Holocaust — so no one can EVER forget. Even reading a small portion of the Washington Post account will haunt you (if you are human) for days. Here’s a small part (read it all yourself):
JERUSALEM, March 15 — The grainy black-and-white photographs of death shock the senses. But it is the personal remnants of life that wrench the heart — a red-and-white polka-dot bow from a little girl’s dress, a postcard flung from a cattle car by a desperate mother, an entry scrawled in a diary one horrible day more than 60 years ago.
“A sight that I will never forget as long as I live,” Abraham Lewin, a teacher in Warsaw, wrote on Sept. 11, 1942. “Five tiny children, 2- and 3-year-olds, sit on a cot in the open field. . . . They bellow and scream without stopping. . . . ‘Mommy, Mommy, I want to eat!’ The soldiers are shooting continually and the shots silence the children’s crying for a moment.”
Lewin’s diary, the little red bow and a vast array of other personal items displayed in the new Holocaust History Museum — inaugurated by Israel on Tuesday — represent a dramatic transformation in this country’s attitudes toward the dominant event in modern Jewish history, according to historians and museum organizers.
Historians say it is the kind of museum that Israel could not have contemplated 32 years ago, when its predecessor opened. Emotions were still raw then, families of Holocaust victims weren’t psychologically ready to give up personal mementos, and the Israeli national consciousness centered on the entire Jewish community rather than on individuals.
“Until a few years ago, we looked at the Holocaust as a phenomenon of the collective,” said Dalia Ofer, a professor of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “We never thought of how each individual person who was consigned to life in the ghetto tried to live his life. This doesn’t take away the importance of the collective . . . but another element has been added.”
“We’re putting individuals at the center, delivering history through personal stories,” said Avner Shalev, chief curator of the $56 million museum, which took a decade to plan and build.
Yes, it was personal. As personal as my grandfather, pointing to each photo, telling me something about the little boy in the photo who had his brains blown out, about the robust-looking tall, thin man with the long, gray beard who he was told died in a concentration camp, about the group photo showing five people whose final years were filled with unspeakable horrors, grief and pain.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Amira Hass writes:
We remember and feel the pain of that liquidation day by day. Let us confront them with it day by day. For example, let it be inscribed on a large marble slab outside every house in which Jews used to live, where they were deported and where they were murdered. Let every railway station from which the human transports were dispatched provide the information: when, how many trains a day, how many people. Let the names of those responsible for the transport be written down – at the police station, the railway station, city hall.
The way to fight the fading memory is not merely with memorial monuments and ceremonies. It is done mainly with an uncompromising rejection of the master race ideology, which divided the world into superior and inferior races and denied the principle of equality among human beings. We were placed at the bottom of the ladder of the Nazi ideology. Would this ideology not have been criminal had we been ranked in the upper rungs?
An ideology that divides the world into those who are worth more and those who are worth less, into superior and inferior beings, does not have to reach the dimensions of the German genocide to be improper and wrong – the apartheid in South Africa, for example.
In her piece, Hass warns Israelis about falling into the same trap in regards to the Palestinians. And that point is a good issue for another time.
But today, I read about the museum and think about my grandfather showing me that book, turning a page, looking at my face. He had done this before but he did it with more determination that day…that last time.
He didn’t know it would be the last time he would remind and warn me.
But, then, none of us know if it’ll be the last time when we remind and warn young people of what happened.
So we do it when we can — and museums do it when we can’t.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.