Remembering

Today, I visited Terezin or Theresienstadt, as the Nazis called it, and I said Kaddish for Willie’s mother.  My family is Jewish; all four of my grandparents came from somewhere in Eastern Europe: Austria, Latvia, Romania and Poland.  An Austrian, Wilfred Stark was my grandmother’s younger half-brother, making Willie my Great Uncle.

In 1938, Hitler forced his way into Austria.  Willie, who was then in his teens, joined the Resistance and got locked up in Dachau where he spent two and a half miserable years. Then, he was released—something that almost never occurred.  Perhaps his mother bribed an official. He fled Austria, and fortunately the U.S. government admitted him to America where he had family. He enlisted in the U.S. army, and his command of German made him useful to army intelligence. His widow says Willie was decorated, but he never spoke of this.  After the war, Willie searched for his mother and learned she had died at Terezin.

Technically, it was not a death camp; it was a resettlement center where Jews were shipped before being sent to their deaths in places like Auschwitz and Treblinka. There were no gas chambers at Terezin, though plenty of people died there from disease and starvation, since the living conditions were horrific. Naturally, guards hanged, beat to death, or shot inmates who gave them trouble.  The place was prettied up from time to time so that organizations like the Red Cross could see how humanely the Nazis treated Jews.   In all, 33,000 people died at Terezin.  Another 88,000 of its inmates were shipped out and died in death camps. Willie’s mother died at Terezin itself.

Other than Willie, every European member of our family who had not moved to America before 1930 was killed.   I don’t know how many there were.  My parents would not discuss it.

What impressed me most about Terezin was not its brutality, which I’d expected, but its efficiency. The Nazis kept excellent records, and produced lots of memos. They had well developed systems for disposing of bodies.  And judging from pictures, Terezin was pretty even during the war, a walled city set in beautiful countryside with grass, trees, a river and flowers.  

I don’t understand what happened; I doubt that anyone does.  I stood in the barracks at Terezin, reciting the mourner’s Kaddish. Its familiar rhythm was soothing, but its words which praise God, seemed completely irrelevant. I know clergy who encourage their congregations to chant:

God is good all the time,
And all the time,
God is good.

It’s not that I disagree.  But in a world where the Holocaust happened, the statement is at best a platitude and can serve as encouragement not to think.