A Personal Touch

As I sat at my lunch table today checking notifications on my phone, I was directed to an article entitled "The Last Cantor of Wlodawa". It would not surprise me if not one person in my entire school had heard of Wlodawa before, let alone be able to pronounce it properly. My source to the link had mentioned it was the synagogue my group had visited this summer, where we danced around and brought life back into the old building. But this was the story of when it lost the life and liveliness it had known. As I ate my sandwich, eyes glued to the screen, the names of more places I had been popped out at me. Wlodawa, the house of the Wansee Conference, Sobibor. It's bad enough reading a sad story, but even worse when you can remember what it was like to be where tragedy had occurred. Wlodawa is a small town in Eastern Poland. Many people have never heard of it and many never will, but I was on the verge of tears reading about the evacuation of the Jews who lived there. I could picture the services that used to be held there and the lawn beside it where we had eaten lunch that day. I wish I could say this was the first sad memory of the week, but if I did I would be lying. I had found a book about the Holocaust and was met by more and more names of places that brought back memories of run down, shoddy areas where atrocities occurred in Europe in the 1930's-1940's. This Sunday night we commemorate the Holocaust with Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance. I was always interested in the first hand experiences and stories people had to offer but it was not until this summer that I realized how difficult it must be for the survivors to talk about it. While at Majdanek, the first big camp I visited this summer, my group sang the Hebrew song Acheinu and we continued to sing it when we visited other camps and throughout the summer. When I got home I left again for a week at a summer camp and after sunset came on Saturday night, we sat down to sing slow songs as Shabbat ended. We got to Acheinu and as I sang the familiar words I could not help but feel as if I was still in Poland, standing in the circle looking around at eyes swelling with tears and heads down. It made me feel weak and helpless, knowing the history of where I was standing and how little could be done about it now. Every time I sang the song and it brought back the overwhelming terrible feelings I thought I had left in Poland. After five months of this routine I was back with my group singing our songs from the summer. We transitioned from happy upbeat lyrics into Acheinu and I prepared myself for the sadness, but it didn't come. I couldn't help but smile being surrounded by the only people who could understand how I felt about it and our voices grew louder and more upbeat instead of solemn and quiet like they had been for two weeks in Europe. "May the holy one be merciful to our fellow Jews who wander over sea and land, who suffer oppression and imprisonment. May God soon bring them relief from distress and deliver them from darkness to light, from subjugation to redemption." We are no longer imprisoned and suffering but we can never forget our ancestors who were. As we light the yellow memorial candle to honor the six million Jews who were killed, and listen to survivors of the Holocaust, we continue to share the stories we hear and remember the atrocities we faced with the hopes that we will never have to live through an era like that again.