In Maidanek, before the ashes of only God knows how many, I looked at him and finally admitted the truth to myself and to him. “There isn’t enough room, is there? In all of Israel, we could fill the country and there still wouldn’t be enough to bring them all home.”
Only one other time on our trip did the topic of bringing the dead to Israel come up again. The main guide, Chaim, took us to his grandfather’s grave. His mother’s father was buried with 85,000 other Jews and though the grave was not marked at the time, the Poles had recorded the man’s name and the grave location.
With two different Polish guides, Chaim was able use the plot number to find the exact location and when he found the grave and was sure it was right, he decided that he wanted to bring his grandfather to rest in Israel. He told his mother and uncle what he wanted to do.
His uncle responded with unexpected anger, asking what of the other 84,999 Jews buried there. “Will you bring them too?”
So Chaim did what he could. He arranged to have a stone marker made for his grandfather and left the grave in Poland, one of 85,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis in that field.
All this and more came to my mind when I saw a picture of desecrated graves in France. It isn’t enough, I thought with anger, to attack the living in France, they are also attacking our dead. They believe, in their incredible stupidity, that the dead can be made less, can be hurt, insulted. Each swastika is at once a badge of shame for Europe, and a badge of pride for the Jews buried there. What they fail to understand, these individuals who hate us so much, is that even in death, even years later when the physical bodies have turned to bone and dust, their swastikas simply confirm that in death, they are what they were in life…Jews.
Jews in life, Jews in death. I think they would have considered that a great honor. Through my fury, I keep telling myself that the writing on the stone is nothing to them, just as the twisted and desecrated stones in Poland were nothing to the Jews buried below. We remember the great rabbis who lived before World War II, their legacy lives on in their descendents and in their teachings. What does it matter if the Poles smash their tombstone or someone in France puts a swastika on stone.
There is something particularly horrible about attacking the dead. Of course, I guess it’s better than attacking the living but somehow, it comes back to the aliyah issue. This is what they will do to you, if you choose to die in that foreign land; for all eternity, you will rest among strangers.
And even if we visit you, you’ll never rest in soil that is yours, in a land where your memory will never be desecrated.
There are many reasons to make aliyah and I guess, though it is hard for me to admit, there are many reasons not to. When we first came to Israel, my husband came here before us and found us a place to rent. I told him I would be happy in a caravan, he found us a villa.
To this day, I feel the same way. I’d rather live very simply in Israel than extravagantly anywhere else. I’d rather eat basics, have the simplest clothes and spend whatever non-working time walking the mountains and streets of Israel, than eat in fine restaurants, wear fancy clothes and vacation anywhere else.