Following breakfast we boarded the bus again for a trip to the Yad Vashem, the jewish national Memorial to the six million Jewish victim of the Holocaust (Shoah). We traveled the entire museum with our guide, Mike, and went throug the Avenue of the Righteous, the new Historical Museum, and the Children's Museum.
Following this emotional experience, we visited the life that is Israel - went to the Jerusalem marketplace and walked through the many shops selling fresh cheese, meats, fruits, vegetables, spices, candy, chocolate, rugaleh, challah and other breads, falafel and much more! There was lots of craziness on the eve of Shabbat - many people screaming and bargaining for the best price and rushing to get home in time to make the meals before Shabbat arrived!
At 4:30 we boarded the bus again to head to Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Mevasseret Zion lef by Rabbi Maya Leibovitz. Many of our participants had the opportunity to share Shabbat dinner hosted by Israeli families.
Addition of The Gershon Family
Most days pass, favorably or not, and add a little something to the memory banks our brains keep neatly stored for our re-use. Few days trigger complex questioning and internal existential internal discussions that we have with ourselves. Today, however, was not just a day for memory but, for those us traveling with Ami Hirsch to Israel, one of those difficult existential internal discussion days. Breakfast passed as usual, sumptuous and more caloric than any of needs, and then was followed by a prompt departure for Yad Vashem. There we found why, if anyone needed to know, there has to be an Israel. We understand that we Jews are a minority in the world and one that, since the writing of the Gospels, has not received favorable reviews. We can, and do, live with other peoples but, with the notable exception of the United States, we do so with the knowledge of a precarious history of pogroms, the inquisition, discrimination, expulsions leading ultimately to the holocaust so effectively documented and memorialized at Yad Vashem. Israel is the escape hatch that makes life in the diaspora ever so much more tranquil. It is the sabra, the tough prickly element that shows the world that progroms, inquisitions, discrimination, expulsions and holocausts are much more difficult to pull off now than they used to be. The symbiosis of America and Israel gives us now the strength that we lacked in 1933.
Yad Vashem is a collective experience but we, the Gershon family would like to share with you a little of the personal experience of our family. Dr. Bill Angen, Anne’s father was a physician with the United States Army. He was operating in the vicinity of Munich when a call came to go immediately to a suburb that no one had known of previously called Dachau. As a doctor, he carried a good Leica camera and had rolls of very good Kodachrome film. He arrived in Dachau within hours of the first Americans to do so and began shooting, not his gun (although with the SS operating throughout, he slept that night with it under his head) but with his camera. He also captured some film from the Nazis. We thought we might add to the experience of Yad Vashem, by sharing a few of Bill’s pictures and some of Michael Gershon’s, taken years later of the liberation (the only term possible) of the Dachau Concentration Camp.
The Nazis thought a lot of themselves and were addicted to parades, even in war. The arrow points to the commandant of the guards of Dachau
This is a picture of Bill and his buddies who were coming to end the Nazi reverie. They were still in France at this time. They look happy and cocky. The happiness was not to last.
This is what Bill remembered forever of his entrance into Dachau. The Nazis had a well developed, if macabre, sense of irony. It was only death and not work that made one free in Dachau. Work was the prelude, death the only end the Nazis had in mind for their victims.
Inside the wire the victims looked at the American as the deus ex machina of Greek drama, but this was not a drama; it was reality. Even the weather was good.
Dachau had a kennel club, but these dogs were not man’s best friend. They were part of the Nazi machine.
This was prize for which the Nazis intended their victims to work.
This is a picture of Bill. His expression tells it all. Behind him, in the care are the should-have-been patients for whom he arrived to late.
Here is Bill’s pass. This was a crime scene and was recognized as such. It had to carefully protected.
Many of Bill’s pictures are too gruesome to show; however, you can see what happened when the Nazis ran out of coal. The furnaces stopped but not the killing. Only the American Army stopped that.
People died without their clothing but the Nazis saved even that.
If you go to Dachau today, you can see the plaque (Killroy was here). Actually, it was Bill’s division, the 42nd Rainbow Division of the American Seventh Army Medical Corps.
This is Dachau after the United States Army cleaned out the Nazis.
This is Dachau now. You might think it is a Disney version. Dachau for the kids. The wire, however, is still ugly and meaningful.
This is Michael, years of the liberation, looking at what his father in law accomplished. Dachau is much cleaner.
This is how the residents of the quiet little suburb of Munich want you to remember their town. Come visits and enjoy a holiday in Dachau.
Think of this, the Germans say, do not think thoughts of Yad Vashem. They have never lost their love of irony (“Arbeit Macht Frei”)
This is another view of Dachau today. American Jewish irony intended.
After Yad Vashem we all experienced Machaneh Yehuda. People preparing for Sabbath peace. G_d rested and so do we. It is wonderful that we are here in our country (we are Americans, yet Israel is our country), while the Nazis are no longer in theirs. It was an end of a day when Logan Gershon could look for the perfect strawberry…and so it should be.
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