Zachor...remember

[filkerdave]

I'm going to start with the end of the day first, I think, because the earlier part deserves to stand out.

I got off the Metro and walked down to Lush. Many, many of my friends, people whose judgement I trust fully, like their products, and since I have a nice big tub here at the hotel

Comments

[delennara]

Thanks for sharing your experience. It reminds me of my visit in the Memorial center of Dachau. I was there when I was 16, and rather overwhelmed by the experience - maybe because I was still so young and naive, or maybe because it IS just too much too understand. I think the bit that touched me most back then, was not seeing the graves, or the gas chambers, but reading the letters, feeling the ...athmosphere.. of fear that place was still holding.
Maybe it is time, I look at this chapter of history again, as adult. Not forced on me, as it was in school, and not in a group of teenagers that gives a certain dynamic, but from my free own will.

[demoneyes]

Yes, we had a family holiday in my late teens and as we were passing through Munich my father insisted we visit Dachau so that we might see and learn.

Perhaps it might be different now - perhaps letters or interviews would move me more now - but what chilled me then was seeing the gas chamber and thinking back to the photos I'd seen a few minutes earlier in the museum of that same room piled high with bodies. It was no longer something remote in a picture, a film or a book but something real. People, tens of thousands of people had died - been murdered - right where I was standing. And that memory is still so vivid, 25 years later...

[poltr1]

Thank you for sharing this experience with us. I didn't know this museum existed in Montreal until you mentioned it.

[madfilkentist]

Thanks for telling us that. Having visited Buchenwald a little over a month ago, I understand, even though my connection to those horrors isn't as close as yours.

[demoneyes]

For those in Britain, there's an excellent permanent (free) Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in South London. I visited it a few months back and barely managed to scratch the surface in the time I had available. It traces the entire history from the early propaganda and victimisation through the early extermination squads in the East to the final functionings of the death camps and afterwards. Very well done, in far more detail and depth than our modern "dumbed-down" museums are usually allowed to do.

Now I'm reminded, I must make a point of remembering to revisit sometime when I will have the time to do it justice.

[thnidu]

Thank you for this.

Years ago, when I was in Ieper, Belgium, on business, I found myself at the World War I memorial park. "Ieper" is the Flemish name; you probably know it by the French name, Ypres.

As I stepped down through the tower, looking at the names carved in the walls, I unexpectedly saw a Jewish name, with a British military affiliation. Then another. I touched them and said Kaddish for them, and for all the others there.

Here is something I wrote thirteen years ago for Yom haShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). I've made a couple of little revisions since then, but I'm not going to put them in at this point or delay this comment to do so.

Again, thank you.