A Peep Through the Holocaust

I just walked through it - The New England Holocaust Memorial - one brutally chilly evening in Boston. My sister and I were threading the path from Hanover St. leading to the nearest Orange Line station where we were to catch the train going home.

Our icy breath. I wasn’t aware of it at first, but the smoke pushed by our mouths and nostrils, they suddenly seemed to chase a larger congregation of smokes. And it was both surprising and surreal to realize that having just completed my Freedom Trail walk, how come I missed that. That in that small patch of grassy land, fronting the historic Union Oyster House, stands
a moving memorial to the victims of history’s greatest tragedy - the Holocaust. Despite the cold, my sister said that we could stop by for a few minutes. She pointed to the six luminous glass pillars which was 54 feet high each. Each tower represents the 6 concentration camps (Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Chelmno) of the Nazi regime. They are internally lit by a subdued light. Small ones that are  stationary and one moving light. Then from underneath the towers, warm air was coming out, passes through the tower and on to catch the cold wind above. From afar, they looked like smoky breath, like they gathered the last breaths of all murdered Jews, passed them through a chimney and made them travel upward until they could reach heaven. And all of them, the six million Jews who perished, stripped of all material belongings, they died stripped as well of the only lasting possession they could have had - their name. They died represented by a number. These six million registration numbers were etched in all the six glass towers in an orderly manner.

Standing there,taking in all scenes and the stories of the survivors etched as well in black granite tablets, was purely one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever had. Here I am, in a convenient part of history, equipped with a wide array of choices , from choosing what clothes to wear in the morning to choosing the next president in 2010, what right have I to complain for
having a shitty life? How can I even complain of having a bad hair day when 7 decades ago, Jews in Auschwitz don’t even have a single strand of hair to speak of? One survivor told of a story featured in the memorial wherein a girl named Ille, while in a death camp was holding a raspberry. She was holding on to it so tightly and waited for him the whole day so she could
present the raspberry on a leaf. He said “Imagine a life where all your possessions are in a raspberry, and you have to give it to a friend.”

This is why people who take lengths to prove that Holocaust never happened evoke such a strong emotion in me. There is a growing number of them in YouTube and there are still a lot of them under the umbrella of racist movements. For the life of me, how could they? How dare they even try?

What, in my humble and limited capabilities, can I do so no more Holocaust will happen? I guess, just standing there and be moved is one thing, writing about it and affect others is another.