Teen sees Holocaust as more than just a Jewish concern

For Maggie Yates, 17, remembering the Holocaust is no longer just about being Jewish or a minority.  To help her generation connect to it and become responsible today, she said, “we need to understand it’s about being a human being.

Maggie Yates

Speaking at the Yom Hashoa service on May 5, she knit the generations of survivors and everyone else together.

Some of her insights come from spending February and March at a boarding school near Tel Aviv and traveling throughout Israel to visit sites her class studied.

At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, she saw a quotation on the wall:  “I’m tired.  Maybe I should sit on one of the benches that says ‘Jews only.’” 

Beneath the quote is a life-size print of a woman sitting on a bench marked “Jews only.” She covers her face in humiliation.

“Never again can we allow ourselves to be humiliated.  Never again can we cover our faces in shame.  Humiliation leads to dehumanization for those who commit the evil acts, as well as those who suffer from them,” said Maggie, a junior at Lewis and Clark High School.

“Every year at Yom Hashoa, we are told to remember, but how do we remember?” she asked.

“We must look at images of starving children and dying grandparents.  We must see the pain in their eyes and force ourselves to connect with that pain,” she said, recognizing that even though it hurts, “we must carry a little of our own suffering in order to remember their suffering.”

Maggie realizes remembering is not enough to prevent the next genocide, because she knows that there have been attempts at mass murder around the world since the Holocaust in World War II.

“We remember what Hitler did, the pain he caused, but what has it done?  It has not stopped the newest tyrant from annihilating the newest guinea pig.
“Those lives are as valuable as Jewish ones,” she asserted.  “How can we speak of remembrance when our brothers and sisters are slaughtered in Darfur? When our nieces and nephews are tortured in Bosnia?  When machetes are tools of ethnic cleansing in Rwanda?”

Maggie recognizes that remembering does little good in an age that calls for action.
Proud of those who survived or resisted the Holocaust, she suggested that their survival was mostly luck, not from heroic feats to save themselves or others.

“How many more could have survived if action was taken!” she challenged.  “Passive resistance is never enough.  No one did enough then.  No one is doing enough now.  At times it is necessary to resist actively, politically and militarily to save lives.”

Maggie called for honoring those who died by both remembering and acting to protect humanity, Jews and Gentiles.

“It is no longer about being Jewish.  It was never about being a minority.  It is about being a human being.  We can all connect to it, and we are all responsible for it,” she said.

When her class in Israel studied about an escape attempt by 1,200 people in the Treblinka death camp, they learned that at the end of the war only 40 of the 600 who escaped were still alive.  When the teacher asked if it was worth it, a student said that 40 lives that would have been lost were saved, so 40 people went on to have children and grandchildren.

“We agreed it was worth it,” Maggie said.  “Every life is the world to someone. Every person has a mother and father. Every person is someone’s son or daughter.  Every person has value.

“Numbers are not significant.    Every life is as important as the next.  The loss of one life is or should be as painful as the loss of millions,” Maggie said.  “Each person should count, not just be counted.  We should shed 6 million tears, one for each person who was unjustly murdered.  I hope these tears of remembrance will motivate us to act, so future tears can be prevented,” she said.

“We may be the last generation to hear the voices of survivors, so we must listen to them well.  We must carry their voices into the future and retell their stories through our actions every day, not just once a year,” Maggie said.
“Remembering is not enough now.  It hasn’t been for a long time.  Reminding is now our responsibility.”


Best selling author writes a poem
on the universal nature of suffering
Michael Gurian, a social philosopher and New York Times bestselling author, was in Spokane on May 5 for the Yom Hashoa service, reading an original composition he wrote at the request of Spokane Holocaust survivor and educator Eva Lassman.

Michael Gurian

In the piece, “I Am a Jew,” he expresses the pains and sufferings he and others, as Jews, experience now and have experienced in history.  He also expresses recognition of the universality of suffering, a reality calling Jews to identify with all people around the world who suffer, and a recognition of all who suffered and suffer with and for Jews then, through the years and now.
“Every day, I feel great sorrows and joys.  This is a Jew,” he said.

From seeing ghosts in trains to wondering about the Nazi role in making a Mercedes Benz, Jews encounter reminders of the horror of the Holocaust.
He ponders:  “Jews have forgiven the world, but has the world forgiven the Jews?”

Michael “discovered” he was a Jew and what that meant when he visited Dachau, walking in remembrance of that cruel time, thinking of the piles of spectacles, bones and teeth, aware that gypsies, homosexuals, Catholics and other people considered undesirable were swept away, and “became Jews, too.”

Sixty years ago, he writes that people like Eva Lassman, Ruth Izakson, Miriam Abramowitz Ferszt, Carla Peperzak and Jacob Gurian looked to the stars for guidance  from cages.

He posed some questions:

“Jews, you have nearly died out, why should you again decide to live?  You were forsaken, why should you again believe? I am a Jew.  Should I sit in silence in a locked house?  Should indifference be my vocation?”

He asks about forgotten street children, Buddhists beaten in Tibet, Hindus drinking fecal water, knife gashes across eyes of Sudanese and Iraqis weeping for lost children. 

With wars ravaging the earth each declared “the sacred wishes of a wizened master,” he wonders who will speak for or embrace men coughing blood, women whose children are torn from their arms, Saudi youth enraged by their poverty, Jewish Israeli children riding a bus toward a suicide bomb, and daughters of meth, prejudice and no goals.

“I am a Jew, and I ask you, Why are we here, if not to make an identity and then give it to those who need?” he said.

Jews knowing “the severity of life and its mission,” he believes, can “make a journey through grief, joy and forgiveness” and through their experience, ideas and song can sew “ever-new seams of hope into the world’s woes.”

For him, being a Jew means being “chosen to know in the face of extinction the permanence of G-d.”  So he will love, and he asks others to join him in “a garden of memory and affection we have grown together in 60 years of courage and  spirit.”

The only shame is the absence of love, he said, calling people to pray for the pain of the centuries, and see “G-d’s breath make even of death a loud light.”
Michael invites others to “become a Jew, for this moment,” to care for people in the world, to remember and love.  While “any trembling hand can pray,” he adds:  “Let us be a human pack that makes words, talks and laughs together, and sings.

“Let there be nothing more horrifying to you than morality without a conscience,” he said.  “The Jews know of this.”

He calls for people to join in a dream of courage, “where our minds can envision ever-greater freedoms because our feet already walk free.”  He calls for people to “waste no more time, waste no more fervor on lies.”

As a Jew of 47 years of “no special courage,” Michael said he has lived a human history.  On facing death, he hopes people can look into their children’s eyes and murmur: “I have done what I came to do.”

He urges people to find a quiet place where they can hear the eternal voice.
“Give bravely, whatever small gifts you have right now, so that even when you are old, and tottering is your only grace, you’ll cry out, ‘Come at me, Life, I’m still here!’

“No matter how heavily you fail nor how terribly you foresee the worst, be a person who cares, be the new human for whom hate is no feast—merely a flavor we once tasted—be a gardener who grows life from ash and tells ancient stories of love and mercy, even in the most evil hours.”

He challenges people to “be a sweetness on this earth, a flaming word—an unrelenting Jew.

For the full text, visit http://www.michaelgurian.com/holocaust_speech.html.



By Mary Stamp, Fig Tree editor - Copyright © June 2005