Yad Vashem: Naming, Remembering, and Acting

I visited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC nearly 15 years ago, and the memories are still indelible. So I thought I would be prepared for what I would find in my visit to Yad Vahsem, last week in Jerusalem.

I was not. Surprisingly, it was the building itself that stunned me. I've never experienced a space so evocative in its starkness, so inexorable in its narrative line.

At times I found myself going numb. At times I merely evaluated the exhibit materials with historian's objectivity and questions about the curatorial choices. But time after time the building stopped me short. It led me not only to better understand, but to bear witness.

The building led me in many ways, especially in revealing the survivors' courage in telling their stories in powerful, first-person video narratives. Their faces and their words will not leave me. But it was the collection of empty shoes that undid me. I had been doing fairly well at maintaining a sort of solemn, scholarly reserve until those shoes. It was the number of them exactly my daughter's size that stopped me short, rooted to the spot for a seemingly unending moment. I felt as if I could not go on.

At last the building drew me forward, opening into an upsurge of daylight framed in concrete. I stepped out into a cantilevered view of the Land of Israel.

I understood for the first time.

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I am haunted by what our tour guide said as she led us to the building's entrance. She said "Please, never, ever forget this: it didn't have to happen."

One person who isn't letting us forget is the NYTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof. His column last Saturday "Walk the Talk" reminded me the things is to do something, not just to fret after dutifully reading with concern books like Samantha Power's "A Problem From Hell: American in the Age of Genocide." (see here for Powers on Rwanda and Darfur)

Yad Vashem challenged me: the land is spread out before you. You have the knowledge. What shall you make of it?