The Gift of Remembrance : Renouncing God : Holocaust Tourism

"In the summer of 2017, I took my family -- my wife and six of our nine children, ages eight to 22 -- on a trip to hell. Rather than tour the beautiful sites of Europe, our mission was to explore the darkest places in Jewish history. Where Adolf Hitler was born, where he and his aides had formulated the Final Solution, where Nazis had ghettoized, deported and exterminated six million Jews and where the last remnants of Eastern European Jewry subsist."

"I'd been watching this tragedy slowly fade into the background of our collective consciousness. A modern, not an ancient, catastrophe, and yet the last witnesses were dying off. A year earlier, my friend and mentor Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, was lost to us, too. People were losing a connection to the most important object lesson, the greatest evil, that history had ever shown us. It was becoming academic, a question for films and books, not something told in the anguished voices of tormented victims. And as a matter of mere history, it was becoming obscure."

Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Los Angeles, California

Elie Wiesel, visiting Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem in 1986, stands in front of a photo of himself (bottom right corner) and other inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. (Sven Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images)

"I am forced to stretch out my hands and to beg. ... Fathers and mothers, give me your children ... I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation, I must cut off limbs in order to save the body!"

"I must take away children, [imploring ghetto parents to hand over their children for deportation and slaughter] and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid."

Head, Jewish Council of Elders Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Lodz Ghetto, Poland

Yad Vashem ... Mordechai Rumkowski speaking to a crowd in the Lodz Ghetto, Poland, June 15, 1940

"It [Tykoein, Polish shtetl now a museum with a synagogue dating to 1642] was like a ghost town. It hurt because all the stories I grew up with about the shtetl of course acknowledged that there were persecutions and pogroms. But they were framed within an overall context of close-knit and passionate Jewish life."

"The Jewish baker, the Jewish butcher, the Rabbi, the Synagogue, the Jewish market. The whole shtetl coming together every Shabbos for community prayers."

"Here, there was nothing. You get there and you're like, 'Where are all these people'? Oh, they were taken to a forest and shot. I remember thinking, 'Wow, all these happy moments came to an end, and I'm standing here at that end'."

"We are here to remember the 1.5 million children of the Holocaust even if it leaves us incensed at God. We're here becquse the six million don't want to be forgotten."

Shaina Boteach, 22, post-family-European trip to Holocaust sites

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his family at Treblinka, a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. (Courtesy of the family)

 

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany released findings from their 2018 study that informed the public of the fact that 11 percent of the adult American public and 22 percent of millennials had not heard or were uncertain they had heard of the Holocaust; 31 percent of adults and 41 percent of millennials believed two million Jews or fewer had been killed; while 41 percent of adults and 66 percent of millennials were unable to identify Auschwitz as a Nazi extermination camp.

Rabbi Boteach cites these numbers as the impetus for his decision to travel to Europe with the younger of his children for the express purpose of seeking out sites in Europe ineradicably linked to the Holocaust. To confer upon them the gift of a lasting memory. To refresh, replenish and restore while enlarging whatever they had learned up to the time of their departure of the momentous disaster that extinguished the lives of six million Jews. While the population of Germany knew absolutely nothing of what was transpiring.

And while the world looked on, unbelieving that a plot so diabolically nefarious, so wide-spread, so without protest at the inhumanity of the lead-up to the carefully engineered plan to destroy an uncountable number of lives by first degrading them as human, likening them to a global disease, a pestilence, so that tormenting them in public, demeaning, threatening, violating their human rights would arouse no particular backlash among Germans, even as disinterested Europe looked on with boredom, no governments and their populations sufficiently invested to react.

Rabbi Boteach would teach his family a lesson in history that would have sticking power; none of his children would forget what their own eyes witnessed, what their ancestry boded, what modern history would retch up for posterity. What he hadn't reckoned on was that exposure to the sites where these atrocities and links to them took place did impact on his impressionable children a bit of the immediacy of the horror, but nothing, no after-effect exposure could come close to the degradation and despair those who lived it felt.

At a memorial in Budapest, iron shoes represent Jews who were shot and thrown into the Danube River during World War II. (Peter Kohalmi/AFP/Getty Images)

 

His children would be left haunted by what they had seen with the links to the horrors, indelibly marking them for life. But who is to say that other children guided by their parents at a remove in exposure to the deliberate eradication of European Jewry and the global inaction in response to open genocide would not be similarly haunted, retaining those facts, circumstances and realities throughout their lives? The decision was his to make and his children's to bear. And after the fact, he second-guesses his choice.

Impacted by his children's wavering in their belief of an Almighty, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. Other than God chose to go off duty at that time in history, to set aside his omnipotence and just allow humanity to prove what it is capable of. So, it's a tossup, did the decision to expose his children directly to the sites and haunting visions of Europe's surrender of its Jews to an ideology of genocidal hatred accomplish what he meant it to, or did it move his children to denounce God's absence and absent him from their lives? And which scenario would disturb him as a failure of his intent?

Three of the Boteach family's eldest children failed to accompany their parents on this tour of Europe's dismal failure as a civilization. He describes them as being 'conversant in Jewish history'. Would that be insufficient, necessitating direct exposure to historical sites of colossal, well-earned infamy? He acknowledges that his younger children accompanying him would have "wanted to have more fun", and assuredly fun and Holocaust redux do not match.

 

The Boteach family outside the Reichstag, home of Germany's parliament, in Berlin. (Courtesy of the family)

Once arrived in Germany they headed for Wannsee, where the planning was initiated to launch the mass murder of Europe's Jews. His children were, in his description "horrified and riveted". It is a horrifying and riveting reality, reactions they would have expressed being informed of the situation while remaining at home. Rabbi Boteach speaks of the dissonance of visiting a concentration camp during the day and a movie at night. Yes, that might be incongruous, but the latter is far more judicious for children than hauling them to the remains of a concentration camp.

He describes his children's unease at the arrival of a German high school group with a guide at the site, while understanding the need for young Germans to be exposed to their history. At home. And after that Wannsee trip the recommendation by an Israeli security guard accompanying an American Jewish group at the major Holocaust memorial in Berlin suggesting they remove their yarmulkes to avoid the risk of assault, and his refusal to do so.

His partial sympathy with his youngest child who begged "don't make me spend my ninth birthday in Birkenau", leading to his decision to take the family to the Lodz ghetto instead where over 245,000 Polish Jews had been caged until they were finally eradicated. The birthday girl was presented with Polish dumplings from a nearby kosher kitchen takeout which failed to cheer her up while they hunted for the precise location where the-then ghetto head appealed to parents to surrender their children to be murdered so they could work for the Nazi war effort and be themselves (temporarily) spared.

Afterward the birthday girl informed her father before bed that this would be a birthday she would never forget. He will himself perhaps never forget his 19=year-old daughter having "a crisis of faith". She felt overwhelmed with emotion and said: "How can you still believe in God after seeing Dachau and all the other horrible places?"

Three years after that fated trip with his family, he reconsiders: "In Vienna, we should have seen a Mozart or Strauss concert. In Warsaw, we should have visited the shops. In Krakow, we should have seen the Wawei Castle. At times, my kids thought me obsessed and mad." As a good father, sensitive to the needs of his children, he claims not to have taken them on that journey to hell "because I thought it would make them more empathetic or humble. I've always wanted my kids to have happy childhoods and sought to protect them from unnecessary trauma".

Precisely. Will he ever realize that the trip was his, was for him,  not for his children, all of whom he has with perhaps good intentions, traumatized...?

German troops carrying a Nazi flag enter the Polish town of Lodz on Oct. 9, 1939. Over the next several years, almost all of the city's Jews were sent to concentration camps where they perished. (Paramount News/Pool/AP)