I had an afternoon to be a tourist in Frankfurt on the way back. I examined the map to decide what I should see--obviously the Jewish Museum. It would be a useful antidote to the anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish feelings one hears in the Middle East. There was a reason, after all, that the Jews fled Europe for Palestine.
But there again was that question. The Muslims historically were much more tolerant of the Jews than the Christians were. Why should Arabs pay for German sins? Better to have given the Jews Bavaria. Why should Arabs pay for Russian pogroms. Better to have given the Jews Moldova.
I zigzagged from my hotel near the Hauptbahnhof to Untermainkal and to the museum. The displays focused on the history of Jews in Germany since the Middle Ages. There was more on the folk culture than on the pogroms. There was a fascinating model of Jüdengasse, the narrow street in the prewar Jewish ghetto. A few displays on the Holocaust. But I thought it lacked the power of other places I had been.
I must have learned about the Holocaust sometime when I was growing up in Indiana, but I'm not sure when. I don't think I really began to appreciate its horror until my senior year in college. During spring break I hitchhiked up to New York, and I spent one night at the home of Alex, a Jewish classmate and a fellow writer. I got up earlier than he did, and his mother fixed me breakfast. I can still smell the toast and coffee; see her fleshy arms and her curly dyed red hair; hear her low voice full of a painful power. I wonder if it was because I was a WASP from Indiana that she told me what she did, as I sat there riveted, stunned almost.
She and her husband were Polish Jews. The Nazis took them and their families to a concentration camp. Everyone was killed except them. Everyone. She listed her relatives who died--her parents, his parents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, her own son and daughter--Alex's brother and sister. That was one thing I couldn't get out of my head--that Alex, born after the war, had a brother and sister that he never met. She and her husband escaped from the concentration camp and fought with the Resistance. She had a reputation in her group as a fearless fighter. ``I would never show it," she said, ``but I was frightened every minute of every day."
After the war she and her husband made it to America and began another family.
After college in the course of traveling around the world, Laurel and I were hitchhiking around Poland. One morning we took the train from Krakow to Auschwitz to see the concentration camp. What I remember most now are two rooms behind large windows, one filled with shoes, the other with eyeglasses. The glasses especially got to me. I wear glasses. They are so small and so personal, so much a part of the person. It is hard to comprehend the scope of the Holocaust. But when you see a room full of the glasses of the murdered, you can begin to, just begin to comprehend.
In the middle '80s in the course of driving around East Germany, I went to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, outside Weimar. I walked through the first few rooms, the entrance hall where hundreds of thousands of victims were processed in on their way to gas chambers. I was getting more and more depressed by each of the displays. I stepped outside onto the path to the barracks that remain. They were far away across a vast expanse of mud, and the very distance gave one a powerful impression of the huge scope of the tragedy. I felt suddenly exhausted and incapable of walking that far. I returned to my car.
In 1996 I went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which before World War II was one of the three great centers of Jewish culture. The Nazis wiped out 100,000 Jews. Only one of 96 synagogues remains. I went to the Holocaust Museum in a small four-room wooden house, and found this as powerful as any representation I had seen. In the first room what struck me the most was a photograph of a woman clutching her baby turning away from a German soldier who is about to shoot her, as though her body could protect the baby. What is as remarkable as the content of the photograph is the fact that someone took it and was not shot for taking it. The soldier was not ashamed of what he was doing.
Two rooms later, covering an entire wall, there were small pictures of the Jewish inhabitants of Vilnius before the war. These were the victims, and you can begin to comprehend the enormity of what was lost. This display had an impact that was particularly personal. These were the faces of the people you see in American academia. These were the pictures of my friends.