GAYS, GYPSIES & GENOCIDE

“How did you get into Holocaust education?” is a common question and I tend to answer differently depending on who’s asking and what’s on my mind.

Why I Do What I Do: Reason #3

Exactly 69 years ago, Nazi guards at Auschwitz murdered in one night almost all Birkenau prisoners categorized as “Gypsies.”

Three months earlier, when Auschwitz guards surrounded and sealed off the Birkenau Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp), the prisoners armed themselves with shovels and iron pipes and refused to leave their barracks. In response, over several weeks, Auschwitz administrators transferred Roma and Sinti prisoners capable of work to other camps. Just under 3,000 people—mostly children, the elderly, and the sick—remained.

On the night of August 2nd 1944, Birkenau guards marched with their guns into the Gypsy camp and forced the women, men, and children toward and into the gas chambers.

Until a few years ago, I didn’t know that the Nazis had systematically sterilized, ghettoized, and murdered people of Roma and Sinti descent. Just as the Jewish community refers to the Nazi genocide as the Shoah—catastrophe—, the Roma community uses the Romani term Porajmos—devouring. The Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered approximately 25% of the one million Roma and Sinti living in Europe.

Yet the Roma and Sinti were not recognized as victims of Nazism until 1979.

The Nazi genocide of European Jewry echoed through familial and community memories into my 1980s childhood. The Holocaust films we watched in Jewish youth clubs, the Jewish Holocaust survivors we listened to at school, and the hushed conversations we overheard at home ensured that our Jewish identities would be molded by a Jewish responsibility to remember our dead. The dead Sinti and Roma were never mentioned.

It wasn’t until 2005 that I started to notice.

I’d just moved from London to Chicago. I was getting used to the larger food portions and the divisive politics. And I started to become involved in the gay and trans rights movement. I came across a news article that would change the way I think about Holocaust history: In January 2005, world leaders gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. But Polish authorities had prevented representatives of the gay community from attending.

I asked one of my professors if, instead of sitting an upcoming exam, I could research and write a paper on Holocaust memory, focusing on how and why the narratives of homosexual victims of Nazism had been pushed to the margins of genocide commemoration.

I knew a fair amount about the Jewish Holocaust narrative, but I felt embarrassed, as a politically engaged gay guy, that I knew so little about the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals. I began to explore books and articles. I didn’t know about the origins of the pink triangle. Or the German anti-homosexuality law Paragraph 175. Or that the Nazis considered lesbians non-threatening—a euphemism, perhaps, for “easy to rape.” I learned about the Nazis’ forced castration and arbitrary torture of homosexual prisoners. In some concentration camps, concerned about masturbation, the Nazis forced homosexual prisoners to sleep with their arms outside of their blankets, even in the dead of winter.

My work led me to ask questions about collective memory and silenced histories.

I learned that, after liberation in 1945, British and American lawyers recommended that homosexual prisoners of the Nazi camps be re-incarcerated. Homosexual survivors were denied reparations. Paragraph 175 remained on Germany’s books for decades. And in the 1990s, Ultra-Orthodox rabbis and conservative Christian clergy protested against any inclusion or mention of homosexual victims in U.S. Holocaust museums. Homosexuals persecuted during the war were not considered victims of Nazism—and did not qualify for reparations—until 2002.

Marginalized victimhood became the focus of my doctoral research. And my work broadened. Surely, I began to argue, if a goal of Holocaust education is to identify warning signs of future atrocities, then students should learn about the relationships between different forms of Nazi prejudice, policy, and persecution. This approach is especially vital in the face of continued government-led oppression of Roma, LGBT, and other minority communities around the world.

We can’t understand—not fully—any one of these victim group narratives without the others. The Nazis conducted experiments with gas as a method of murder on people with disabilities before building the gas chambers and ovens that consumed the Jews, Sinti, and Roma. While the Nazis tried to find a “cure” for homosexuality, they considered people of Jewish or Gypsy or African descent as “incurable.” If we omit the non-Jewish victims of Nazism from our collective Holocaust memory, then we lose something critical to our understanding of the Nazis’ full intentions.

I understand why Simon Wiesenthal was frustrated with the insistence of some prominent historians and scholars that definitions of “The Holocaust” refer to only Jewish victims. Definitions matter. Definitions determine what and who makes it into history textbooks and exhibitions and remembrance ceremonies.

I now focus my work on helping educators find ways to include—meaningfully and appropriately—all of the Nazis’ victims within Holocaust commemoration and education. After all, if the Nazis made room for all of these categories of people in their concentration camps, if they made room for them in the same mass-graves, then we have a responsibility to make room for all of the dead in our classrooms, museums, and memorials.


What I Do What I Do: Reason #1

What I Do What I Do: Reason #2

CRYING TO BE HUMAN

As far as I can remember, learning about the Holocaust has never made me cry. How would I respond in Auschwitz?

I cried when I said goodbye to my friends and family before moving from London to Chicago. I’ve been known to cry when I've had a few too many drinks! I cried when my grandmothers died.

I teach about Nazi eugenics and the development of gas vans and Nazi experiments on pregnant women. And rail cars and Jewish and Roma and homosexual survivors and post-war suicide and inherited trauma. I’m an avid reader of Holocaust literature, particularly for young adults, and I watch and teach Holocaust films. I’ve listened to many Holocaust survivor testimonies—both recorded and live—and I’ve explored Holocaust museums around the world. I’ve tried to wrap my head around the fact that the Nazis murdered so many children who were disabled or Jewish or Roma or Sinti. I learned about the Holocaust in primary school and at home. But the horrific content of Holocaust history, testimony, film, and fiction has never made me cry.

Today, as we stood by the ruins of a gas chamber in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I talked about my personal connection to the Holocaust. My grandfather escaped Nazi-occupied Holland, I explained. But, as far as I know, he didn’t talk about his family’s story. We don’t know the details, but we’re pretty sure that many members of his extended family were murdered in the Nazi camps.

As a teenager, during an organized trip to Yad Vashem, I took myself up to the museum’s archives. The woman behind the desk warned me that finding information about my murdered family would be unlikely; unless, she said, they were Dutch and had an unusual name. “They were from the Netherlands,” I replied, “and the name is Ziekenoppasser.” She led me to the books of the dead. In the final book, on the final pages, I found a list of men and women with the last name Ziekenoppasser, deported from Amsterdam and other Dutch cities and towns, murdered at Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, the Yad Vashem online database lists 33 entries for Ziekenoppasser. I suspect some of these people are our relatives, but we might never know.

This morning, in the Birkenau prisoner processing center, I found myself searching the anonymous family photographs for people who resembled my Mum’s side of the family. I felt sick as I looked at each image—children playing, weddings, family portraits. But I didn’t cry.

A little while later, standing at the ruins of Gas Chamber III, I recited to my group the little I know of my family’s story. As I did, I wondered if this was exactly where they were murdered and I felt—suddenly, unexpectedly—as if I was honoring their memory. But I didn’t cry. Instead—and this now seems absurd—I realized that I might want to return to Auschwitz, one day.

Yesterday, at Auschwitz I, we stood inside the still-standing gas chamber and walked through the reconstructed crematorium. We wandered into rooms displaying piles of adult shoes, stolen before their owners were gassed. The shoes of murdered children were displayed separately. When I saw the mounds of human hair, I felt a pain in my chest—like a punch. I found myself asking our guide a question about the exhibit, perhaps to prevent myself from crying.

In the Auschwitz prison block (a prison within a prison), we looked at the original bunks, we walked past standing-cells, and we stared at walls covered in official photographs of camp prisoners in their striped uniforms, emaciated men, androgynous women, all soon to be dead. I didn’t cry.

I followed our tour guide, as if in a trance, staring at a pile of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and shaving brushes. My mind took me to the perpetrators. How did the Nazi guards allow themselves to participate in these horrific crimes? How could human beings treat other human beings in these horrific ways? It’s unfathomable.

As I walked through Auschwitz, I thought about my family, murdered here. But I didn’t cry. And I thought about the Nazi guards who led them to their deaths. The Nazis must have been in some kind of trance, I found myself thinking. These murderers had hypnotized themselves. They weren’t thinking things through. They were confused, intoxicated by the mist that moved through the system of violence and murder that they had designed. If the Nazi guards and their leaders had stopped for just one second, surely they would have realized what they, as humans, were doing to other humans.

Last night, I shared this notion—of Nazi guards in a trance—with the rest of my group. “The Nazis knew what they were doing,” people in my group reminded me, “they knew what they believed.” I was listening carefully to what they were saying, but it didn’t make any sense.

When I teach about Holocaust history, I not only strive to humanize the Nazis’ victims; I also strive to humanize the Nazis themselves. Too often, through Holocaust films and museum exhibitions and fiction and the sensationalist media, we portray the Nazi leadership and lower-level camp guards as monsters. We display photographs of Nazi officers in their pressed uniforms, smiling with their fingers on the triggers of their guns, watching with cold eyes as children are marched to their suffocation. We call them evil. Monsters. As if their actions were inevitable, uncontrollable. By doing so, we excuse them; we ignore the decisions they made. The frightening truth is that the Nazis were just as human as their victims. Years before they became Nazis, as children, they played games and did their homework. They had life dreams and ambitions. They fell in love. They had children of their own. But if we paint these men and women as monsters, we keep the perpetrators at a distance. Look what they did, we say. This is what evil looks like! By painting the Nazis as inherently inhumane, we are saying that “real” human beings could never perpetrate or become complicit in genocide; we could never be capable of committing such atrocities, we tell ourselves.

The image of Nazi guards, walking in a trance, following murderous orders, replayed again and again in my head. How can it be possible to see others as anything but human? “It’s impossible,” I said to my colleague. “No. It’s possible,” he said to me, “—it’s just impossible for you.” I understood what he was saying and, for a moment, I choked on my tears.

FROM MY HOTEL ROOM IN AUSCHWITZ

We just arrived in the town of Oświęcim (pronounced Oshvienshim; renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis). We’ll be here for one week. But I’m ready to return home.

It’s as if everything we’ve seen and talked about so far has been leading to this.

I arrived in Poland with a number of misunderstandings. I didn’t expect its towns and cities and buildings to be so beautiful. I didn’t expect to be eating at sushi restaurants while listening to Adele and Justin Timberlake. I didn’t expect to meet people dedicated to rebuilding the Polish Jewish community. The Poland I’m experiencing is modern and vibrant and, at the same time—like every country in the world—struggles with its past.

Last year, when President Obama referred to a “Polish death camp”—rather than a Nazi death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland—his comment enraged Poles and others around the world. The Nazis murdered approximately six million Polish people, around half of them Jews. From 1939, the Nazis kidnapped tens of thousands of Christian Polish children who looked “Aryan” and raised them as Germans. I understand why it’s so offensive to think of these sites of atrocity as Polish sites. The so-called “Hitlerites” are hated here.

After our arrival in Kraków, we visited the Gestapo headquarters and prison where we learned about the Nazi brutality against Polish intellectuals and clergy. We entered the cells that had witnessed obscene violence and murder. Just as we were leaving, an old man arrived—he was a former prisoner of the Nazis, our guide told us. We toured the old city. We talked to survivors of Nazi camps. We met with modern-day Jewish leaders. We explored the areas that were once the Jewish ghettos of Kraków, Warsaw, and Łódź. We stood inside synagogues, some restored, some in ruins. We met with a woman who risked herself to save Jewish lives. We explored sites of Jewish, Roma, and Sinti deportation. We walked into Jewish cemeteries. We met with a man whose grandfather was a high ranking Nazi officer. We stood at the mass grave at Płaszów. And we walked through the killing field at Treblinka. I came to Poland and to these sites of Nazi atrocity for a purpose. To see for myself. To become a better educator. To be a witness of memory.

But I’ve seen enough. I want to go home. I miss my family.

It’s after midnight now. Here in my hotel room. Here in Oświęcim. Peaceful, pretty Oświęcim where I ate pizza for dinner. The Auschwitz camp complex is just a short walk away. We’re scheduled to head over to Auschwitz tomorrow afternoon. The next day, we’ll tour Auschwitz-Birkenau. We’ll see the brick buildings and barbed wire. The barracks. The gas chamber of Auschwitz I. The mounds of shoes and the piles of disintegrating human hair. We’ll be here in Oświęcim for one week.

I’m trying to push away any expectations. I’m trying to swallow my fear. I’m trying to pretend that being here is normal. People live here in Oświęcim. Thousands of tourists and teenagers walk through Auschwitz every summer. I’ve seen Treblinka. How much worse can it get? Every day, I read news reports about ongoing genocide. I walk past people starving on the streets of Chicago, all the time. I watch news clips of mass shootings in American schools. And gang rapes in India. And fire-bombings of Roma homes in Hungary. And petrol burnings of gay men and transgender women in Iraq. Seeing Auschwitz shouldn’t be any different. Human suffering is human suffering. Mass-murder is mass-murder. Right?

SOMETHING MISSING AT TREBLINKA

I’m standing close to where they burned the bodies. This is Treblinka. The bus departs soon, but I’m not ready to leave.

At Passover every year, we read aloud the Seder instruction to think of ourselves as slaves being freed from ancient Egypt. And there is the Jewish mystical idea that, when the Hebrews received the Torah at Mount Sinai, all Jewish souls—throughout time—were in attendance. We are connected. We have an obligation to remember because we were—and will always be—a part of the same story. A true collective memory.

“I would have never survived,” my Mum said once, while we were watching a film about Auschwitz. And when I thumbed through books about the Holocaust, I couldn’t help but imagine myself in a Nazi ghetto or a camp or on a suffocating train, surrounded by people I knew. As a Holocaust educator, I now know that we must never ask students to imagine themselves in the shoes of Holocaust victims or perpetrators or bystanders (for the reasons why, see my previous post.) But if, without prompt, we imagine ourselves in the circumstances of history, that is normal; empathy is natural, healthy.

I’m walking through the simple museum between Treblinka I (the Nazi labor camp) and Treblinka II (the extermination camp). Our group educator calls me over to look at a facsimile of a Nazi document—in both German and Polish—that lists specific regional guidelines on the treatment of the Roma and Sinti, the so-called “Zigeuner” (“Gypsies”). The poster states that Zigeuner are to be brought to the Jewish ghetto. Zigeuner must wear white armbands with the letter “Z.” Those who try to help Zigeuner will be shot.

I first heard of the name Treblinka in primary school. I remember reading a poem about a packed train headed to the camp. “Treblinka, Treblinka.” The name sounded frightening to me—a place of horror. Treblinka II was one of the six Nazi camps designed for mass-murder. The site contains the grave of around 925,000 people of Jewish descent and approximately 2,000 people of Roma or Sinti descent, mostly murdered in gas chambers. After a revolt in 1943 during which some 300 prisoners escaped the camp, the Nazi leadership ordered the complete destruction of the Treblinka complex and turned the site into farmland (a reminder that the Nazis themselves were the first Holocaust deniers).

In the museum, still examining the Nazi rules for Roma and Sinti, I realize I’m the only person left in the exhibition. I must now walk alone to the site of Treblinka II. My stomach hurts. I let out a heavy sigh and begin to follow the signs. The pathway is made up of rounded stones, making it difficult to keep the rhythm of a steady pace. The weather is cool, the trees green. This place is beautiful. I walk over the area that once held the camp’s gate. Blocks set into the ground like a ladder indicate rail tracks. Turning left, I face a sea of stones of different sizes and shapes, an abstract graveyard, each stone representing a place. Some stones bear specific names of Polish cities, towns, villages—Warszawa, Chmielnik. Some stones are draped or marked with the flag of Israel. The massive stone monument in the center—standing on the site of one of Treblinka’s gas chambers—is adorned with a menorah, its central branch broken to indicate Jewish lives cut short.

I walk into the open field of short wild grass, tall flowers. In the sunshine, flies buzz around me. I remove my jacket. It is here that their bodies were burned, their ashes compounded. My head spins with moments of my childhood mixed with the events of the last few days.

In Kraków, just days ago, after a lecture on the history of Polish Jews, I asked the professor about the current relationship between the Jewish and Roma communities of Poland. “We cannot ignore the Roma victims,” she told us, even though she hadn’t mentioned them until I asked my question.

Standing here in Treblinka, another question comes to me and my eyes find our educator. I walk quickly to him, across the field. “Is there a monument here to the Roma and Sinti?” I ask. He shakes his head. There is not.

In a few minutes, the bus will depart Treblinka and return us to the restored cityscape of Warsaw. But I don’t want to leave this place. I want to stay here. As if I owe it to myself. As if I owe it to the nameless.

My head is filled with clichés and more questions and some answers. Is this a holy place? No, God does not exist. Do ghosts scream? Are the remains of the people within this soil calling to us to be remembered? Are theses ghosts soothed by the prayers and the monuments and the tears? The Jewish souls call to us through the wild flowers above their single grave. Their cries are answered by the Jewish monuments in Treblinka. In Warsaw. In Berlin. In Jerusalem. In New York. And I stand here, trying to listen to the cries of the Roma and Sinti whose ashes and bones mingle with those of the Jews. We are connected, yet these adults and children are so often ignored and forgotten.

I can hear them and I will never leave.

“We reduced the problem to one between Nazis and Jews. Because of this we lost many friends who suffered with us, whose families share common graves.”—Simon Wiesenthal, 1979

WHAT THE FAKE?!

(HOW TO TRIVIALIZE TRAUMATIC HISTORY AND TRAUMATIZE YOUR AUDIENCE AT THE SAME TIME.)

In coming to Poland to visit sites of Nazi atrocity, I’ve tried to keep an open mind around my expectations. But there was something I never expected to see.

“Where are we?” A train station, attempting to flee the impending attack. But it’s too late. Three steps forward and we’re surrounded by falling, crashing bombs, darkness, smashing glass, screaming. As we turn the corner, Nazi flags block our path. We weave between them and find ourselves on a street. Uneven cobblestones, a tram. We walk into what looks like a courtroom. A Nazi officer’s hat rests on a podium; behind us, a stranger puts it on. Suddenly there are Swastikas covering the floor. As we step on them, triumphant German music blasts on loudspeakers above—a celebration. After boarding the tram, we arrive at St. Michael’s Prison. At this point, we’re frightened to move on. The bottom of the dark stairwell is out of sight but, compelled to climb down, we discover a dark doorway. Behind the locked door, we hear terrifying sounds—coughing, shouting, screaming. It’s not real, we tell ourselves. Running back up the stairs, we find ourselves in the ghetto, weaving through shadows of dark and narrow alleyways, Jewish faces staring out at us. We look through windows of crowded apartments at white figures, ghosts, paused in sadness, illness. Each step is more frightening. Then sunlight, blinding us—this is a quarry, white stones cover the ground, we look at frozen prisoners in the distance through the barbed wire fence. We are standing in Płaszów Concentration Camp, a site of Nazi brutality and mass-murder...

This is the fairly new exhibition “Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945” at the actual site of the Schindler Factory (where Oskar Schindler employed Polish Jews and succeeded in saving the lives of over 1,000 people).

We had expected an exhibition focusing on Schindler’s story. Instead, we experienced a twisted theme-park ride. A Holocaust House of Horrors. Genocide at Disneyland. We cringed and gasped and recoiled; not at the often vague historical content, but at the designers’ irresponsible decisions.

When I teach about the design of Holocaust museums, I usually share with students a working theory I have: Holocaust museums in the U.S. are more likely to sensationalize history through immersive environments and simulations than museums in the U.K., Germany, Israel, and elsewhere. The elevators at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. resemble the interior of the Nazi gas chambers. The floor and walls of a room at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center mimic the killing fields and mass-graves of the Einsatzgruppen (the Nazis’ mobile shooting squads). The Virginia Holocaust Museum warns on its website, “Guests should wear appropriate attire to crawl through an exhibit.”

Through my work, I warn against such designs because...

1. Trying to recreate the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors trivializes the actual events and real stories of the Nazi era. We’ll never know what it felt like to suffocate inside a gas chamber. We’ll never know what it felt like to starve in a ghetto before being deported in an over-crowded rail car to an unknown destination. We can never understand, so why try?

2. These kinds of simulated environments can be traumatizing for adults, let alone 12-year-olds. I’ve witnessed engaged groups of teenagers walk through these kinds of spaces only to become shocked and silenced and unable to discuss essential questions about history and human behavior. The intellectual purpose of Holocaust education is stifled by careless emotional manipulation.

3. Many young people already understand suffering. Many live in poverty. Some are refugees or children of refugees from war torn countries. Many are bullied at school, or abused at home. Some are survivors of rape. Many are depressed, many self-harm, some are thinking about suicide. When we teach about genocide and human suffering, we need to remember that a teenager may already be trying to cope with her or his own trauma.

4. These experiential, literal designs are filled with fake artifacts, fake streets, fake ghetto walls, fake sounds, fake barbed fences, even fake documents. Next to these fake objects, designers display real artifacts. But, because so much of these environments are make-believe, the authenticity of the real artifacts is called into question. In the face of Holocaust and genocide denial, this is a serious problem.

But still these immersive exhibitions are created. And it looks like this phenomenon isn’t limited to the U.S.; Fake artifacts and fake experiences have found their way onto the actual sites of Holocaust history.

After walking through the Kraków museum’s exhibition, we met with a member of its design team. We asked her about the immersive design. They visited museums in the U.S. and copied their approaches, she explained. “We had to use some simplifications,” she told us. “The museum world is changing. To get young people involved, you can’t use traditional methods.” Those were her exact words.

Have museum designers lost faith in young people? Do museum professionals perceive teenagers as incapable of having respectful, complex conversations about prejudice and hate and social responsibility?

Immersive design within Holocaust education seems to be spreading—and getting worse. Museums are spending millions to manipulate and patronize and traumatize their visitors, and to simplify and sensationalize and trivialize history. We have to challenge and change this.

WASHING MY HANDS AT THE CEMETERY

Until today, because of my adherence to a specific Jewish law, I had never visited a cemetery.

When my Grandma (my Mum’s mother) died, I stood in the doorway of the funeral building and participated, at a distance, in the short prayer service. When my family walked down to the cemetery for the funeral ceremony, I stayed behind. I sat on a wall, overlooking a flower garden, waiting. My Grandma would have laughed and rolled her eyes at the absurdity of the archaic rules.

A year or so later, when the mother of my good friend passed away, I wanted to attend the funeral. My Mum was upset by the idea. “But you’re a Cohen,” she said to me, “ —please don’t go.” I attended the prayer service—I stood in a separate section, away from everyone else—but, respecting my Mum’s request, I didn’t enter the cemetery for the burial.

Cohen is my family name from my father’s side. Cohanim—with lineage passed through males—are considered to be the descendants of the biblical Aaron, the first high priest (and the brother of Miriam and Moses). In ancient times, Cohanim performed the duties of the Temple, including overseeing holy sacrifies of animals and grains. In many Jewish communities today, these priests continue to hold a special status.

As a teenager, during high holiday services, I removed my shoes, I held out my hands to be washed with cool water, and, at the front of the synagogue with the other Cohanim, I stood beneath my talit—my white and black prayer shawl—with my arms and clean hands and fingers outstretched to transmit a blessing onto the congregation.

Because of this and other responsibilities, Cohanim must follow specific rules to remain spiritually pure. One emotionally difficult rule is the prohibition of a Cohen to enter a cemetery. The only exception to this is for a Cohen to attend the funeral of his own parent, sibling, child, or spouse.

On school trips, while my classmates toured cathedrals, because the buildings contained tombs, I waited outside. In my late teens, during visits to Jerusalem, when my friends visited Israel’s national cemetery on Mount Herzl, I stayed on the bus. And I didn’t attend my Grandma’s burial or the burials of my uncles or the burial of my friend’s mother.

As I grew older, I began to adhere to the Reform Jewish position on the status of Cohanim: Since biblical lineage is impossible to determine, and since the notion of Cohanim contradicts the value of egalitarianism, I let go of my priestly identity.

A few weeks ago, I called my Mum. I explained to her that I’d be traveling to Poland for my work. I would be visiting sites of Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps and mass graves and cemeteries. I am a Cohen, but I’m also a Holocaust educator. I have obligations. To witness. To explore and to ask questions. And to teach. My Mum understood why I wanted to break the rule.

Today, as I took my first steps into the centuries old Remuh Cemetery in Kraków’s Jewish quarter, I whispered to my colleague that this was my first time in a cemetery and I briefly explained why. The Remuh Cemetery had been practically destroyed by the Nazi occupiers, our guide told us. We were now looking at a field of rescued gravestones that had been placed somewhat haphazardly over mostly anonymous Jewish graves. Assuming correctly that I wouldn’t know much about the rituals of visiting Jewish cemeteries, my colleague explained to me that it was customary to wash one’s hands when leaving such a site, as a symbol of spiritual cleansing.

We wandered along the pathways between the graves. At the back of the cemetery, broken pieces of gravestones had been pieced together to form part of the cemetery’s wall—a monument to the dead, a metaphor for the Nazi destruction, a reflection of Holocaust survivors’ attempts to rebuild their lives, a symbol of the re-emergence of Jewish life in Europe.

In the afternoon, we visited the site of the Nazi concentration camp at Płaszów (pronounced Pwashouv). The Nazis murdered thousands at Płaszów, mostly with bullets, including Polish Christians and Clergy, Polish Jews, political opponents of Nazism, and a group of Hungarian Jewish women originally destined for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war, Płaszów is marked by a handful of monuments. But the site looks like—and seems to be used as—a public park. Our guide pointed out a grass-covered dip in the landscape right in front of us—an unmarked mass-grave. We watched parents stroll around the “park” with their children. We watched one couple sitting on the grass taking photographs of their baby.

Earlier, by the exit of Remuh Cemetery, I noticed the sink for ritual hand washing. But I didn’t use it. “I'll wash my hands when I leave Poland,” I said to my colleague. “Or maybe never.”

THE THUNDERSTORM

When we were given the option to attend a Friday night Shabbat service in Kraków, the idea of reciting prayers alongside other “Holocaust tourists” felt forced. I made an excuse and declined the invitation. But then I changed my mind.

As the congregation finished singing Oseh Shalom—a Jewish prayer for peace—the room flashed with lightening. After a boom of thunder, rain began to fall from the vaulted ceiling and onto the people in the middle of the room. (I think there was an open window.) The crowd of American teenagers cheered and laughed at the fun of it. I started to worry, and I suppose others were worried too, that the rainwater would touch the hanging spotlights. Hesitating only briefly, the Rabbi and her accompanying musicians continued to play. The room was filled with both nervousness and excitement, a contradiction pulling me in both directions.

The Shabbat service was being held in the main hall of the Galicia Jewish Museum. The permanent exhibition had been pushed to the hall’s perimeter, allowing for some 250 people to form a makeshift community; around 150 adults on chairs, around 100 teenagers from NFTY (North America's Jewish Reform youth movement) sitting on the floor, at the front.

I was an observer. The adults swayed their shoulders and tapped their knees to the melodies of the familiar Hebrew prayers. The teenagers sang loudly and clapped along to the beat. Between songs, their leaders shushed them whenever they became too rowdy. My eyes took me to the museum’s walls covered by exhibition panels of beautiful color photographs of the Polish countryside, green fields under blue skies, a garden in bloom, the ruins of a building, gravestones, the empty bunks of a Nazi camp barracks. This was the museum’s permanent Holocaust exhibition, pushed to the sides of the room to make space for this joyful prayer service. The realization was jarring; we were surrounded by remnants of the fields and Nazi structures that witnessed mass-murder.

The Rabbi had started the service by reminding us that we were in the middle of the three weeks between the Fast of Tammuz and the Fast of Av when Jews around the world mourn the destruction of the biblical temples. Traditionally, during this time, music and most celebrations are prohibited. But, keeping her words vague while referring to the main purpose of the congregation’s pilgrimage, the Rabbi suggested that we make an exception.

As the musicians played another uplifting prayer, my eyes took me to the exhibit signs hanging from the museum’s ceiling: “Massacre.” “Jewish Life in Ruins.” I glanced down at the photocopied songbook in my hands and began to read the translation. “Unending love have you shown the House of Israel.” My eyes shifted back to the walls and onto the images of encampments and killing fields—God’s unending love! The teenagers continued to clap to the rhythm and harmonize at the tops of their voices in holy praise. As the Rabbi began to sing “Shema, Yisra’el...”—Hear, O’Israel...—the Hebrew words fell from my mouth as if they had been buried inside me and finally had the chance to escape.

Standing for Kaddish, the mourners’ prayer, the Rabbi acknowledged the photographs of graves and empty landscapes on the walls around us. She reminded us that we mourn the loss of many lives and she invited us to speak the names of our dead. I began to whisper the tongue-twisting words of the ancient prayer, but the names of my grandfather’s murdered family were stuck in my throat.

LIFE BEFORE

How should the story of the Holocaust begin?

We landed in Poland a few hours ago. Kraków's modern airport terminal, 1990s classic British pop on the radio, and the Hard Rock Cafe in Kraków’s market square told me that I was in modern-day Poland. But the open golf-cart-like vehicles offering tours of “Jewish Kraków,” the “Ghetto,” and “Schindler’s Factory” and the wandering groups of Jewish tourists and the signs advertising day-trips to Auschwitz all pointed to the past.

During our thought-provoking orientation in New York, we were issued a warning: Don’t look at the Jews of pre-war Poland through the lens of the Holocaust. After all, the Jews of 1930s Europe didn’t know what was coming. They didn’t see themselves as standing on the edge of devastation.

We tell teachers to place the Holocaust within the context of Jewish history and the history of antisemitism. Holocaust museums and curricula often begin with “Jewish life before” the Nazi genocide. Exhibitions and textbooks start with an overview of Judaism—rituals of prayer, festivals, the life cycle—painting a picture, through family photographs and beautiful Judaica, of individual lives. By focusing on the vibrancy of Jewish culture, we are humanizing the Nazis’ Jewish victims. We are saying—and screaming—“Look! Look what they took away! Look what was lost!”

But is this the right place to start?

When we begin the Holocaust story with the question “Who were the Jews?”, I’m worried we’re teaching that Jewish history was leading up to the Holocaust all along; that the Jews of Europe did something wrong and somehow brought genocide upon themselves; that there was—and continues to be—something intrinsic about Judaism that warrants hatred.

When we begin the Holocaust story with the vibrancy of Jewish culture, I’m worried that another story becomes lost: Driven by twisted ideas about race, the Nazis were obsessed with blood. To them, a Jew’s beliefs and actions were irrelevant. Individuals were marked for sterilization or murder if they had Jewish heritage, regardless of how they identified. The six million includes secular Jews and Jews who were proud of their assimilation and Jews who were married to—and had children with—non-Jews. The six million includes people of Jewish descent who identified as Christians. The six million includes those who did not fit—and still do not fit—the Jewish community’s Halachic criteria of who can and cannot be considered Jewish. The Nazis focused on blood. And not only the blood of people of Jewish, Roma, Sinti, or African descent, but also the blood of the so-called Aryan race, included those Aryans—the disabled and homosexuals, for example—whom the Nazi regime considered defective.

Should Holocaust education begin with “Jewish Life Before” the Nazi era? And, if this might not be the best place to start, then how should we begin the story?

GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ

As teenagers around the world prepare for group trips to Auschwitz this summer, I am preparing to break a promise. If ghosts exist, I’m not afraid of them. Not any more.

The Nazi crematoria of Auschwitz and Sobibor consumed members of my grandfather’s family.

At Jewish primary school, we sat on the scratchy carpet looking up at an old man who recited otherworldly stories of crowded railcars and forced tattooing and ovens in which his family burned.

At home, if a reference to the Nazi genocide flashed across the television screen, my parents protectively changed the channel. But, alone, I stumbled upon films I shouldn’t have seen in which a mass of undressed men trudged toward false shower rooms and German dogs mauled Jewish children as their mothers screamed.

A shelf in my parents’ dining room held books on Jewish history and heritage. Flung open, they revealed pages of terrifying black and white and sepia photographs. Naked women at the edges of open pits, desperately covering their genitals and breasts with their arms and hands. Skeletal figures, still alive, reaching through barbed wire fences. Open mass-graves.

During a weekend away with a Jewish youth group, we sat through a screening of Janusz Morgenstern’s “Ambulans,” an eerie 1961 short film depicting Nazi soldiers redirecting the exhaust fumes from a Red Cross van into the lungs of oblivious children. Shock and silent weeping filled the youth club basement.

Throughout my youth, I suffered from occasional nightmares in which German soldiers besieged my London suburban neighborhood and surrounded my school friends with brick walls and barbed wire. I stood outside, daring myself to enter.

A subconscious fear turned slowly over the years into an explicit promise: I would never visit Auschwitz.

I heard about the organized student-trips to Poland and I felt relieved that my school didn’t offer them. At university, new friends recounted their visits to “the camps.” Their experiences sounded worse than horror stories. “We sang Hebrew songs and we all cried together; you really need to go there,” some would say. They seemed to believe—clutching their travel photographs as proof—that they now understood something I didn’t. I felt guilty for staying at home and skeptical that my friends had experienced some kind of Holocaust-epiphany.

The idea of visiting the historical sites of Nazi atrocities terrified me. I imagined myself inside deteriorating gas chambers, the suffocating stench of disintegrating piles of human hair close by, the feeling of being taken over by profound horror or defeat. I didn’t want to stand where my people—or any people—or my family—choked to death. I didn’t want to be seen trying to make sense of what can never be understood, or to feel obliged to pray or sing, or to be judged if I couldn’t burst into tears along with everyone else.

I had become frightened of the ghosts of my grandfather’s family who would only recognize me as a disrespectful tourist, queuing for that critically acclaimed attraction, seeking that thrill-ride at Birkenau, the ultimate game of dare.

As a grown adult, determined to respond to my community’s history on my own terms, I plucked up the courage to visit Sachsenhausen in Germany.

It was a cold day. The grass was muddy. When the concentration camp was in operation—I remembered learning—there was no grass; the prisoners likely ate it all. We toured barracks and passed watchtowers and said nothing as we stared at the ruins of a small experimental gas chamber and crematorium.

Sachsenhausen seemed to me a quiet echo of our horrific past. I didn’t feel sad or shocked or angry. The Nazis killed thousands of people at Sachsenhausen over a period of nine years; people of Jewish or Roma or Sinti descent, homosexuals, political opponents of Nazism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mostly killed through starvation, disease, exhaustion through hard labor, or intermittent beatings, torture, executions.

But Sachsenhausen represents something different from Chelmno with its gas vans and ovens belching out human ash, different from the Birkenau I’ve come to dread.

Yet, after Sachsenhausen, I felt pangs of relief. Its ghosts—if they had been watching me—had permitted me to walk over their tombs. They had allowed me to breathe the fresh air.

This week, I will fly to Kraków, Poland, with 11 other Holocaust scholars as participants of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program. After visiting Warsaw and Łódź, we will travel to Treblinka. We will spend a week in Oświęcim, touring the grounds of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, studying artifacts, and learning from the curators and education staff at the Auschwitz State Museum.

In general terms, I know what to expect at Auschwitz. I’ve studied the photographs and read the books and taken the online virtual tour. I have a good idea of what we will see and discuss. But I don’t know how I will respond in the moment or how I might be changed by this journey. Part of me fears being entirely overwhelmed. Part of me fears feeling nothing. Part of me expects, at nighttime, to slip back into the surreal Holocaust nightmares of my childhood.

If ghosts exist, I’m not afraid of them. Not any more. If anything, I’m afraid of myself. Yet, I am ready to break my promise.