While walking the paths of an Auschwitz sterilized by the time that has passed since the horrors perpetrated here, I began to doubt humanity and its Creator. I stared at the lush green of a tree reflected in a puddle, battling the obvious fact that trees can not be green here, and neither can water reflect. This is hell that came to earth. Yet, while conscious of this, I felt no blinding pain for the senseless murder of millions of my brethren. Just a void emptiness, the nothingness of a head that’s not thinking. I felt suspended in a world I could not comprehend.
I felt suspended in a world I could not comprehend
I first arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where at least 1.1 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. The sprawling camp glared with its naked red chimneys. There were only remnants of barracks because the inmates had stripped them for firewood, desperate to stay warm in the winter after liberation. A visiting group stood indifferent to the sanctity of this hallowed ground and I heard laughter and menial conversation as they passed. Another young couple stood in a passionate embrace, seemingly unawares of the millions of last goodbyes uttered only yards away.
The entrance to Auschwitz is a building ingrained in my mind. I've seen it a thousand times, in a thousand pictures and videos. It casts a heavy shadow, looming across train tracks. These same tracks head straight into the mouth of the beast. I walked the length of the train track, my head abuzz with Elie Wiesel's description of vicious salivating dogs snapping at a shivering child, just disembarking from a hellish ride.
In front of the gas chamber, a grainy black and white video of my great grandfather, --- Yaakov Shimon Lezerowitz -- played in my head. He was turning for a last peak at a sky that would never turn light again. Zyklon B openings in the ceilings of the gas chambers seemed to mock me as sunlight beamed onto walls that had been scraped and scratched at by hands straining to stay alive.
A low-lying building looks innocuous as do most buildings in Auschwitz. It almost looked inviting on that hot day. The floor is covered by a glass platform that lifts you from touching the bare ground. In here, the inmates where deloused and shaved. Their blue and white striped uniforms were placed in a huge oven to kill the lice burrowed deep in the seams. A sign outside the building read “Disinfection.”
As I sit reflecting on my experience in Auschwitz months later, I noticed that this week’s Torah portion contains an important lesson that can shed light on this shadow of doubt and destruction of the Holocaust.
In this week's Torah reading, we find Abraham sitting outside his tent, in recovery from his recent circumcision. Through the blazing sun, three figures approach his tent. In pain from his surgery, but indomitable as ever, Abraham runs to welcome them to his tent. A feast of amazing proportions begins -- a bull per guest is slaughtered. Unmasking themselves as angels on a mission, one stands to bless Abraham’s wife Sarah. The angel says, “At this time next year you will have already given birth to a child.” Sarah, in understandable disbelief, laughs at the prospect of ever giving birth, doubtful that a body wracked by time and age could conceive.
Nothing is as impossible as it seems
Just like Sarah, we often doubt, as I doubted that day in Auschwitz. Yet, Sarah ultimately gave birth to a beautiful child, Isaac, despite her unwillingness to believe the unbelievable. I have learned that although we may find ourselves plagued with fears, uncompromising situations and decisions, we can look to the miracle of Isaac’s birth and see that, in plain-sighted reality, nothing is as impossible as it seems.
There was a moment, one moment, of pristine clarity in Auschwitz that left me, once again, believing. It was as I stood at an oversized guestbook, its vanilla pages beckoned me to pen a thought. I wrote, “You are remembered. You are survived. Your deaths were in vain, but your lives were not. I have come back to this place to declare that we, the Family Lezerowitz, lives.”
It was at that moment I finally shed a tear, no longer doubtful or indifferent.
