Column: Holocaust Remembrance Day personal for columnist
Hillary Brady
Issue date: 4/21/09 Section: Editorial/Opinion
The only thing that gave him pause was one of the museum's most powerful exhibits.
A nearly bare room, dimly lit and quiet, showed a model of Auschwitz's gas chambers. Replicas detailed the entire gruesome mechanism, while white-washed clay figurines of people stood lined up outside the doors-representations of the individuals, like many in Bernie's family, who met their end there.
To enter this exhibit, visitors had to walk through one of the boxcars used to transport Jews to Auschwitz. It was there Bernie had to stop.
He stood outside the boxcar, suddenly trembling and holding his wife's hand. A man who had survived so much, seen so much death and destruction and triumphed in spite of it, stood scared of this old, wooden boxcar.
The last time Bernie approached the door of a similar car, he had been a young man being deported to a concentration camp with his family. He faced those same sliding doors more than 60 years later with an expression on his face so earnestly devastated that it seemed like no time had passed since.
I walked inside with him, and Bernie approached a cut out window on the side of the car. He looked around, getting his bearings, shifting left and right, before settling on a spot. This is where he had stood, he explained, all those years ago. He pointed to places on the worn wooden planks where his mother and family had been. The last time he saw many of them alive was in that boxcar.
Bernie passed away a few months later and my group and I went to sit Shiva with his wife and children. The traditional Jewish grieving ceremony was something most of us were unaccustomed to, and walking into his house was unnerving. The space he had occupied such a short while ago was crowded with relatives, photos and cards-testaments to the exuberant, funny, loving man Bernie had been.
But the thing that stood out the most was dangling from a clothing hanger in the living room. A worn shirt and pair of pants with long horizontal stripes, graying with age-Bernie's Auschwitz uniform.
A nearly bare room, dimly lit and quiet, showed a model of Auschwitz's gas chambers. Replicas detailed the entire gruesome mechanism, while white-washed clay figurines of people stood lined up outside the doors-representations of the individuals, like many in Bernie's family, who met their end there.
To enter this exhibit, visitors had to walk through one of the boxcars used to transport Jews to Auschwitz. It was there Bernie had to stop.
He stood outside the boxcar, suddenly trembling and holding his wife's hand. A man who had survived so much, seen so much death and destruction and triumphed in spite of it, stood scared of this old, wooden boxcar.
The last time Bernie approached the door of a similar car, he had been a young man being deported to a concentration camp with his family. He faced those same sliding doors more than 60 years later with an expression on his face so earnestly devastated that it seemed like no time had passed since.
I walked inside with him, and Bernie approached a cut out window on the side of the car. He looked around, getting his bearings, shifting left and right, before settling on a spot. This is where he had stood, he explained, all those years ago. He pointed to places on the worn wooden planks where his mother and family had been. The last time he saw many of them alive was in that boxcar.
Bernie passed away a few months later and my group and I went to sit Shiva with his wife and children. The traditional Jewish grieving ceremony was something most of us were unaccustomed to, and walking into his house was unnerving. The space he had occupied such a short while ago was crowded with relatives, photos and cards-testaments to the exuberant, funny, loving man Bernie had been.
But the thing that stood out the most was dangling from a clothing hanger in the living room. A worn shirt and pair of pants with long horizontal stripes, graying with age-Bernie's Auschwitz uniform.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Elizabeth Herron
posted 4/21/09 @ 10:05 AM EST
Ms Brady - this was an extraordinarily well written and thoughtful letter! The realization that in this era of apparent complete self-absorption demonstrated by so many college and high school through their relentless focus on technology and the need to Twitter every minute of their mundane life, that there are still some who are aware of and concerned for those much less fortunate. (Continued…)
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