Last year, Dominik, our Aunt Elisabeth, and I spent Yom HaShoah at Mauthausen. I suppose that it’s good that I’ve seen one of the camps, although I’m not entirely certain why it’s good and I certainly never intend to visit another of them. There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether or not they should be mostly closed to tourists, and I’ve of mixed minds on it. We saw a lot of bored school children, and I’m against taking students who aren’t old enough or mature enough to understand what they are seeing—who could be bored by the crematoriums, which is mindboggling to me—because I think there is something very dangerous in going and not being changed. And I’m also not sure it did me any good to have gone myself; it didn’t teach me anything, it only added a visceral layer to the horror of it all for me, and like most Jews, I was already carrying around more than my share of horror at the Shoah already.
This year, I was home for the reading of the names.
There are a lot of possible ways to frame the experience; it’s the first time I’ve attended, and I imagined it would be a sad, grim ordeal. And it was certainly sad and grim, but it was something else that I didn’t expect: it was a tiny bit triumphant. I sat there with these other Jews—many of them related to me, and many of those who weren’t still people I have known and loved almost all my life—reading the names on the street where the entrance to the shul is, and where this part of town gets sketchy.
That street, in this town, just doesn’t seem like a likely place for Jews. But our congregation has been here, in one form or another, since the 1880s. We’re smaller now, and there aren’t enough young people in the congregation for there to be a clear path forward (but we’re all very hopeful!). But I think back to our trip last year, to the beautiful synagogues of Europe that stand, but can’t get a minyan and don’t have a rabbi, and so are mostly museums or monuments, and I marvel at our presence. We have a much larger and more active Jewish community than either Graz or Salzburg, for instance… we, little Huntington, WV! And there is something particularly hopeful about the future of our people in the fact that there are enough of us, still, to read the names and remember even in this unlikely place.
I think that’s beautiful, Sarah.
I love you Sarah