Amazing Grace...

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

This morning we left Warsaw and drove to Lublin. On its outskirts, we stopped at the Majdanek concentration camp. When the camp was overrun by the Soviets in 1944, the Nazis did not have time to destroy their evidence, as they had in other camps; as a result, the entire apparatus is still intact. As Irving Roth noted, if the gas were to be provided, Majdanek could be up and running in an hour.

We stopped at the entrance for a long but incredible lecture on the development of the Nazi concentration system, from its original inclusion of political opposition, to its growth into a three-tier system that included slave labor camps, extermination camps, and concentration camps (as well as mixes of the aforementioned categories).

I’m not entirely sure how to go on with this account, so please excuse any failures that occur in my storytelling as I grapple with the reality of today.

There was no blood. Of course, there was no blood in the gas chambers. We knew this going in, but I was still unprepared for the sterility of the chambers, stained only with blue patches of mold that have grown consequently. An overwhelming emptiness surrounded us; the echo of our silence was our only companion, for words have no place in places like this... where human sin becomes tangible. We marched on through the remaining barracks, through the room filled with personal shoes – shoes with no matching pairs, tattered and torn, blackened with dust… though the washing rooms and the crematoria…we walked mostly in silence, except when Avi read or Irving talked.

In the end, we walked up to the huge monument and ascended the steps onto its platform. As we looked out, before us lay a field where 18,000 Jews had been murdered and buried in a single day, the grass rolling in waves where the pits had been marked, and behind us lay a concrete bowl filled with tons of ashes of the thousands who had suffered and met their ends at Majdanek. It was here that our group sat to commemorate and remember, as we had seen best. Greg, Luis, and I had planned a ceremony which, thankfully Greg was hosting…I could not have imagined speaking at this point. From the point that Randy began by asking all of us to bow our heads and lead us in prayer, I felt two constant streams flowing down my cheeks. I did little to wipe them, as I had only the presence of mind to pray. Following this, our small choir sang “Amazing Grace,” leaving the last verse to be sang a cappella (without Tommy’s guitar accompaniment) by the entire group in a single, echoing voice. This was followed by several readings and two more songs, and then, THEN Irving read the Kaddish. Needless to say that I at no point attempted to compose myself; there was no need for such artificiality in such a place and among such a group, for we all understood that suddenly and acutely on this day, the tragic loss of millions of people (Jews and non-Jews alike) had become the tragedy of one person…two people…three people…

To mark the end of the ceremony with hope, David Machlis, the Vice Chairman of March of the Living, who also happens to be traveling with us, led a sweeping crescendo chant of “Am Yisrael Hai.” At the end, somewhat out of breath, all forty-one of us turned to see, on the other side of the (circular) monument, a busload of IDF soldiers assembling for their own ceremony. They looked at us and we at them across the seemingly massive expanse of tons of human ashes….we watched them put up their flags and microphones in silence and walked to our bus, mutually nodding when we passed each other…what more did we really need to say, that we had not just solidified? The people of Israel live.