FOR THE NAME AND THE PLACE
On the 60th anniversary of Yad Vashem
Excerpt from DARK STARS, WISE HEARTS: Personal Reflections on the Holocaust in the Modern Times forthcoming book by Inna Rogatchi
By Dr INNA ROGATCHI
(C) Inna Rogatchi, 2014 –
The Law to Remember
I do not know anyone who visited Yad Vashem and was not shaken deep down his own world by the enormity of the Evil’s deed to the humanity that confronts you at any meter of the Yad Vashem vast premises. Some visitors are crying quietly in the dark modern halls during demonstration of short documentaries telling the most touching and completely unbelievable people’s stories. Some others walking through so huge and beautiful Path of the Righteous ones are experiencing waves of endless gratitude towards those people who were saving Jewish lives against all odds and despite all risk. And just everyone is completely overwhelmed by the Children Pavilion for the rest of one’s life.
Thinking about Yad Vashem from the 60th anniversary perspective of this unique institution, there are a few fundamental things to ponder about. There are many Holocaust museums in the world today, and still, there is only one Yad Vashem which stays above and apart all of them, due to the fundamental fact of its origin and the essence of this Land of Memory on the Israeli soil.
The very establishing of Yad Vashem as the implementation of the special law of the state of Israel has been the historical reality of an unparalleled significance. The law on the establishing Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel passed by the Knesset unanimously back in 1953, has laid down a very special foundation for the entire process of remembering the Shoah victims and those who did help them, both in Israel and abroad. When memory is constituted, humanity is contributed. And this is our, Jewish, Israeli way of life.
The law establishing Yad Vashem had been passed at the same year when my husband, renowned Jewish artist Michael Rogatchi was born, in the premises of another concentration camp, the Soviet one, at the Russian Far East, at the nice and inviting to life place known as Valley of Death. When he paints his works from his troubling In the Mirror of Shoah series, he knows about people being hunted and treated as animals – or worse – from a first-hand’ experience. That’s why he was very much at home talking at length with Simon Wiesenthal during many years of our all’ friendship. The one of the works from the series The Way ( 1993) had been with Cyla and Simon Wiesenthals at their home in Vienna until them both’ passing away in 2003 and 2005 correspondently.
The other work from the series, Unforgiviness ( 1993) is in Israel, as a part of the collection of our dear friend Ambassador Yossi Haseen. The triptych Faces of the Holocaust ( 1992) is a reminding to people that the Shoah has affected the entire family of the house Israel.
However troubling the images of the Michael’s works from his Shoah series are, they are staying in people’s mind for a long time, as we are hearing all the time. I will always remember the woman in her 60s in Poland who was staying a whole night through in the front of the glass wall of the Judaica Centre in Krakow in mid 2000s watching intensively the Michael’s Final Solution painting that had been next to the wall. The woman turned to be the one of ‘the hidden children’ of the Holocaust who learned about her Jewishness when she was over 60 years old. When Michael was signing and presenting her the print of the painting which did struck her so much, the woman was shaking with a mixture of anxiety and gratitude. She felt as ‘being recognised to be a Jewish person now’,- she whispered to Michael fighting back her tears, unsuccessfully so. We both did try the same, with the same effect.
The fundamental thing about Yad Vashem for both of us is that they all, the victims of the Shoah, dead and alive, are recognised on their Land. Nothing else matters more.
* * *
Families Ties
Yad Vashem had moved to its current world-known location on the slope of Mount Herzl, forming the Mount of Remembrance, in 1957, in the year when I was born.
I do see the symbolism in those two dates coinciding with years of birth of both of us, my husband’s and mine, in the way of prescription for us to remember, on behalf of our both families, several members of which had been murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust in Ukraine. My great-aunt Minna Chigrinsky who was only 18 at the time, with the entire family of her aunt, my great-grand aunt Pesja and her husband were annihilated in the Autumn of 1941 in Dnepropetrovsk. Michael’s aunt Galina Reiss and her two small children, and a close relative Gershon Feldman all were perished at the same time and place, not to mention all the friends, neighbours and distant relatives of our both’ families.
My grandmother Adel Chigrinsky could not sleep normally till the rest of her life over the pain caused by the loss of her beloved younger sister and the aunt who did raise Minna as her own child as my grandmother’s mother died during Minna’s birth. My grandmother felt tormented all the years of her life by her self-imposed guilt that she and her family, us, could not save Minna and Pesja’s family.
Michael’s grandmother Sofia Reiss did not sleep well till the rest of her life either. Losing her husband Josef Reiss, Hungarian Jew from Budapest, officer of the Austrian army during the Great War and military engineer during his few Soviet years, to the NKVD and Stalin’s purges in 1937 without a trace ever since, she was longing for her eldest, the first daughter, and her grandchildren whose all’s lives were cut so short and so brutally by the Nazis and their enthusiastic Ukrainian helpers.
During the days, our grandmothers, wonderful Jewish hostesses of warmest in the world homes, were busy with their home routine. The nights took their tall, and the faces of their dearest and beloved lost ones re-appeared again and again; and our both’ grandmothers were woken up in the mornings with the faces puffed by tears, and with that never leaving pain in those eyes of the millions and millions of Jewish people whose lives were marked by the Holocaust the one way or another. We would never forget it. The wet in the morning eyes of our grandmothers and their songs, sometimes incredibly sad but always very gentle, are tiding us with our people by a quite-essential bond. It is tights us up firmly with Yad Vashem too.
* * * *
A Hard Work of Remembrance
People entering Yad Vashem are getting not just into another memorial complex however big and overwhelming. They are getting into the Land of Memory – and here one can immediately understand, and rather feel, the meaning of the Yad Vashem’s name coming from the Book of Isaiah – “Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name (yad vashem) better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off” (Isaiah, 56:5).
Remembering it is a hard work, and the more we learning about the Holocaust in many of its dimensions, the more it is to be realised. It is not ‘just’ gathering, storing and exhibiting all the giant mass of the information which is done by many museums and does serve the purpose. But it is also a scrupulous research which is conducted by decades by now; it is serious in-house and international investigation work; meticulous publications; wide-spread teaching and education. It is also new dimensions in the building up the body of Remembrance of Shoah, such as the art museum with its very precise and truly fair concept; the film library with its massive database. Importantly, it is also a new age of communication with all those so different people, hundreds of thousands of them, visiting Yad Vashem daily. In order to be heard by them one has to be both scrupulous and honest, simple and effective. In its newest complex telling the most unbelievable human stories in an unassuming although highly sophisticated way from its six screens, like six islands in a comforting darkness – as Shoah makes darkness to be comforting, indeed – Yad Vashem team has succeed completely in that intimate talk with each of its thousands visitors daily.
Each of these human stories coming to us from the screens had to be created from a scratch. And most importantly, the stories are connecting the generations, literally. It had been the Yad Vashem archivists who did find the people in Europe who had no idea about their own grandfathers and grandmothers’ heroic deeds. The people from older generations were murdered by the Nazis, and the families were not that enthusiastic to tell the reasons of it in detail. It were Yad Vashem stuff who brought the knowledge and who did help those people to reconstruct the stories of their families, and to detect the approximate places of possible burial of the brave and courageous people who did not lost their humanity in the darkest hour of the XX century.
Now their grandchildren do know not only about decency and heroism of their own grandparents, but also on what has happened in their own village, and whom those golden glasses that had been in their family for a couple of generations, belonged to. They now know about the people whom their grandparents were trying to save, and most importantly, they are telling about it all in schools, churches and synagogues, at various public meetings, big and small ones. The memory is alive. The Remembrance is breathing.
* * *
Speaking Trees
There are so many places all over Europe bearing the marks of the Holocaust. In a remarkable way, those marks did not dried out in a course of the seven decades passed. In many places which had become tragic scenes of the Shoah bottomless horror and helplessness, there is a palpable presence of energy or atmosphere of a quiet, ultimate, catastrophe, like in the W.H. Auden’s helpless cry in the midst of the war, back in 1940: “ Eyes look into the well, / Tears run down from the eye; / The tower cracked and fell/ From the quiet winter sky”.
At those places one can still feel some certain emotional messages, as if they are still trying to reach out to somebody from the time when those places were inhabited by the people with the names.
I have tried to capture on my photographs and collages some reflections of those spiritual messages as I feel them. When entering the boundaries of the former Krakow Ghetto, you do feel such powerful sadness and emptiness that the very term ‘Final Solution’ materialises in your head graphically. Even without knowing what was happening at this place, you do feel that the abandoned space around you as if soaked in grief.
Echoing the impression, we were told that after the war, people were refusing to settle in the territory of the former Jewish Ghetto in Krakow, and still do it extremely reluctantly even so the prices for houses there were very low ones at any time.
“And even those who did dare to live there, were moving out eventually” – our Krakow-based friend told us. “No wonder, who can live here where just every stone emanates this incurable pain”, – noted my husband whose part of the family is from Poland.
The similar kind of sadness is embracing you at the Ponary, or Paneriai forest near Vilnius where over 70 thousand Jews were mass murdered. Despite being frequent at the places connected with Shoah all over Europe, I tried to prepare myself before coming to Paneriai. I thought that I would see something exceedingly frightening there. And I was surprised by a very distinct feeling of an absolute sadness all around that forest, but not in a crushing and gruesome way. It was as if the souls of those people who were slaughtered in the Ponary forest by Nazis, were present there and talking to us. At the time of reciting Kaddish at the places of slaughter, the hugely tall trees over our heads all of the sudden started to move, with their long branches being shaken – with no change of the sunny and windless weather at all. They stopped to tremble punctually with the end of the Kaddish. “They are talking to us”, – somebody whispered nearby. – “At least, they know that we are here”, – somebody else whispered back.
Each of the European places connected to Shoah has its own over-tone in that reaching out’ motion. It does correspond to some features of the characters of the given countries, naturally. The influence of the Jewish population onto the culture and societies of the countries where they were living throughout centuries on that compulsory route of the historical migration had always been very significant. It is impossible to imagine France without Chagall and Soutine, or Czech Republic without Kafka, or Italy without Modigliani. Those people and so many others had enriched the countries and societies where they were lived in enormously. But so many of them were paid back in a devastating way, as bleeding to death in 1943 artistic genius of the world calibre Chaim Soutine who had to sleep on the streets running away with nowhere to go, as a wounded animal, while trying to hide from the Nazis and Vichy; or as tens of great Polish and Lithuanian artists, writers and composers who fell victims of Shoah in all those numerous ghettos and death camps.
We do remember them all, and nobody does it better than Yad Vashem. Importantly, Yad Vashem does help to each of us to do this demanding work of Remembrance in an individual way. Remembrance is a strictly personal business, always.
* * * *
The worst of those places, to me, are the ones in the countries of the origin of that feast of the Evil on the earth, not surprisingly. One can hardly feel itself sane while observing numerous flower boxes decorating balconies and windows of candy-like looking houses just hundreds meters off the massive gates and very premises of the Mauthausen on Austrian slops. I am still literally suffocated while by-hearing enthusiastic guides in Berlin showing the place of ‘our mightiest stadium, just there’ pointing behind the Reichstag. You are entering the Neue Synagogue on Oranienburgstrasse in Berlin, the main synagogue of the Berlin Jewry from mid XIX century and until the Kristall Night’ outbreak of horror, and you are paralysed, obviously by the same kind of a complete helplessness that overwhelmed the Jewish people who were attacked there with such zoological hatred.
In the places of ghettos, you can still feel the traces of humanity that transcends through the time from all the souls who had been brought in there. In the places of their massive methodical extermination you still feel that unspeakable and hardly comprehensible energy of horror. While filming with me the execution facilities at the Mauthasen, my Finnish camera-man who had been all over in Africa covering all the wars and conflicts there for two decades, literally fell unconscious slowly slipping down to the floor with his camera still firm in his hand and his face sheer white. He was drinking, in silence, the rest of the evening that day. In the places like that, you can often feel, still, the pulse of the hatred, and you can recognise those cold, steely, methodical signals of its existence.
* * * *
My great-aunt’s glasses
And then, apart of the atmosphere of the certain places, there are subjects. I do believe that a detail tells it all, in both good and bad. Such details are present in my Black Milk & Dark Stars collection of the works reflecting the Holocaust in many places where it did occur. A little suitcase where the blackened trace of previously glued to it David Star stays as an opened for ever wound. Left over mannequin with left over small Zinger sewing machine; the dresses are there, the tailor is nowhere. Just one pair of broken glasses from a millions glasses like that fell from Jewish faces. Somebody’s personal photograph of one’s dear one, – without name, without place. A page of a book, never read through. Look, there some money left in that little purse, and the ghetto ration coupons, too. A comb, a pipe, a pen. And two small clay dolls made in ghetto for the children; the dolls colours preserved over seven decades and it reminds us on pitch darkness around our Jewish kids who never grew up. A million and a half of them, conservatively.
Sometimes, the time itself as if speaking to us, – by the window in the Ukrainian city still broken with its aged lace curtain behind, from the decades back. It was a Jewish home once. And it still be there, empty, broken, waiting, in all it stunned and stunning freeze. There are also the gates of the Big Isaac synagogue in Krakow, still opened, still waiting for the synagogue parish members to get it. But it is a random tourist visitors coming in instead. There are irreversible things in life, and when it inflicted in the life tissue and process by force and horror, the pain stays on, does not matter how many decades passes on.
Melted with a permanent longing for all those souls which had been eradicated from this life by a sadistic mind with help of so many happily provided hands, the thinking on the victims of the Holocaust gets into metaphorical images reflecting the process of remembrance. The grey, as a human hair in sorrow, fair in Italy reminds me on what Primo Levi could be thinking about during his lonely nights for thirty years after the camp. The still moon in a midst of a chilled sky in Poland brings me back to Elie Wiesel’s dreams which are not all told in his works. And the forest in Ponary is all wears the Jude stars, in my own dreams.
They are all with us, exterminated and survived, with or without names and places. To the very large extent, it is secured by the existence and activities of Yad Vashem. Simon Wiesenthal has told to me and my husband that when the situation had become desperate for him and his friends and colleagues to continue their work in mid-1950s, due to the policies led by then US Administration which has decide to work with Nazis instead of prosecute them, he has send all his files to Yad Vashem. What would happened, we thought, if there would not be Yad Vashem in existence?.. Also for Wiesenthal, with whom we have discussed the episode several times, Yad Vashem always sounded as a re-assuring point, both as a fact of life, and as a moral check-point, too.
* * * *
Echoing Lights
In the way and efforts of remembrance, people follow their personal associations and hopes hidden in it. The myriads of candle lights all over imaginable windows of the Jewish streets of Krakow in the Michael’s Echo of Kazirmierz painting reflects his efforts to keep this light ongoing, does not matter what. In my photography work Krakow Hours II of the real house on the real street of the same area which is depicted on my husband’s canvas, there is just one candle, with its strong and live light on. The girl reading her book in that house in Krakow is real too, 70 years after the nightmares powered the streets of the Jewish Krakow where my maternal part of the family is from.
In many ways, this scene is linking generations and makes the Silver Thread unbroken. It gives hope for continuation of the line of spirit that keeps generations together, and it is vital because humanity is a source of decency when it exist in its wholesome, not fragmented, form.
Human Dimension is the essence of what Yad Vashem is about, for both of us. We can feel the pain of its stones, and can imagine the nightmares that the stones are seeing all this time, sixty years on. Yad Vashem also has its magic: any face, any pair of eyes, ever seen on the screens, or tables, or any exhibit within its premises stay with us for good. It is not happening often, nor does it happen as a result of visiting many other pretty good memorial institutions world-wide. There is that commitment and devotion which are palpable in every corner of Yad Vashem that results in its magic. During six decades of the existence of this unique institution, the Yad Vashem team implies the Human Dimension onto any aspect of their work.
It is scrupulous, hard and noble way of Remembrance. It is an exemplary phenomenon of loving and caring memory on one’s people and those who did try, regardless of the outcome, to save the victims of Shoah.
We salute to our dear friends at Yad Vashem, at all and every level of the organisation. As Jewish people, we are extremely grateful for all their work, and are very proud of our national Institute of Tireless Remembrance which provides enduring comfort and strengths to the Jewish people entirely affected by the tragedy of Shoah forever. This all makes Yad Vashem not only the Authority, both currently and in a historical perspective for many decades to come, but also it makes Yad Vashem the pride of the Jewish state and the Jewish nation world-wide.
For the Name and the Place.
Thank you. May the LORD continue to bless you.