The Humboldt Diaries: A Prairie Teacher's Journey: Daughter of Hope

Taken from the condemned. I will never forget the smell.

Her name was Yennj. She was middle-aged with grown children. She and her husband were business owners. She liked to garden. Her universe revolved around her family. I related to her immediately.

She and Heinrich, her husband thought often of leaving their small town in France to begin new lives in America. But for this reason and that they never made it happen.

They died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.

I gripped the biography card in my hand, handed to each of us at the beginning, as I wound my way through the maze of the Holocaust museum. At one point I tossed the card into my purse, then fished it back out. I wanted the tactile reminder that the images and objects before me came from and about real people. People like Yennj.

Her name was Maya. She was young, beautiful, and spoke impeccable English with a soft accent. She stood just behind me as I waited to get into the Holocaust museum for my second visit this week. My students kept asking if we could find the time to go. After my initial visit I knew they needed to go. They needed to experience what I had experienced on my first visit. I promised them we would find the time.

“Today is National Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, you know.” I turned to the sound of her voice and stared into the beautiful eyes of the speaker. “Today, yes,” she replied to my unspoken questions. Her eyes bored into mine. I asked if she was from Israel. She nodded. “Today we remember that dark time for our people.” She smiled and I liked her immediately. She was in America for a visit and had timed her trip to the museum to coincide with her nation’s observance.

The questions began as a trickle and bubbled to a gush. How was it she happened to be here on such a day? Did she know anyone who had suffered during the Holocaust? How do her fellow countrymen feel about the United States? What are her thoughts on the Iranian nuclear deal? Each question lead to another question and comprehensive answer.

Maya stayed by my side as we were handed our tickets and began to wind our way through the exhibits. She commented on each one with perspective few Americans could possibly understand. Her story began as we waited for tickets and continued to be filled in as we walked together. I know I stared too much and too often. I could not help it. I was stunned.

Here it is.

Her Polish grandmother was sixteen years old when she and her parents were loaded onto a rail car headed for the Treblinka extermination camp. Upon arrival she and her parents were chosen for the gas chamber. Her grandmother was not immediately pushed into line for the “final solution.” Instead she sat outside for twenty-four agonizing hours waiting for orders. Waiting for the end.

A Nazi prison guard approached her at the end of her first full day in Treblinka. “Yesterday’s arrivals will work!,” he shouted. And with that she began six years of forced labor in one of the most brutal concentration camps of WW II. But she was alive.

Her grandfather, also a teenager at the time, was also loaded onto a cattle car bound for death, or near death. While the train roared through a forested area, an elder behind him urged him to jump and try to escape whatever lay ahead for them all. Her grandfather and the friend beside him decided it was worth the risk and leaped from the train in the middle of the forest. They both survived the jump and escaped detection. They remained in the remote forest, living off leaves and whatever edible substances they could forage for until the end of the war. His friend did not survive, but Maya’s grandfather did.

Eventually, her grandparents met, married and immigrated to Israel, where they raised a family.

I stood transfixed as Maya’s tale unraveled before me like a ball of yarn that has escaped clumsy hands and rolled across the floor. I couldn’t speak. There is really nothing to say in the face of such raw agony.

“Could it happen again, Maya? These awful things against your people, could they happen again? She nodded without hesitation. “It could happen in an instant,” she replied sadly.

I sat just to her right and behind as we sat through a short video describing the campaign against the Jewish people of Europe. I watched her brush tears from her beautiful eyes and felt my own fill with liquid sorrow. It was agony for me. How much more so for her?

Near the beginning of my excursion I felt the ever present need to take pictures. For reasons I cannot explain, it suddenly seemed gauche to do so. I chose instead to let the shocking images filter into my mind through trickles and atomic blasts. On my first tour, I separated myself from the group so that I wouldn’t defile my experience with inane small talk. I wanted to absorb on my own terms and at my own pace. To have Maya at my side for my second tour was a gift.

Yennj, my assigned victim of the Holocaust, her husband, and daughter were eventually deported to Aushwitz, where they all perished.

Maya is a reminder that even when humanity is at its most depraved, there are small beacons of sunshine that break through the roiling clouds. She is a daughter of Hope.

Maya relayed that her grandmother had decided that God is not real. How could a loving God allow such atrocities? “God was not in that place with us,” her grandmother deduced. Elie Weisz said much the same thing.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

I will not commit sacrilege here by dissecting such screams from broken hearts. Only those who stepped of those train cars and into the night of evil are allowed that privilege. But I contend that God WAS there. Maya’s very life was proof of that. Out of horror came this beautiful woman who tore open my heart then softly applied pressure to the wound.

I do not think the intersection of our paths was coincidence. She and I were meant to meet and share Communion bread for a brief moment.

We hugged at the end. I had a tight schedule to keep and she had other sights to visit. We exchanged information and promised to stay in touch. I hope we do. I think we will.

I walked away from that building filled with horror and hope and felt a renewed sense of the divine.

And so I share Maya’s story here with you.

I am changed.
I hope you will be too.

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“-

George Santayana

P.S. Please visit the Holocaust museum if you are ever able to do so.

http://www.ushmm.org/