Yom HaShoah

It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I…

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld’s chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

I read this poem, evoking the emotions of a woman crammed into a freight car on her way to the death camps during the Holocaust, right before I read Elie Wiesel's most recent edition of his book Night, describing his own experiences in the Holocaust. His book is, needless to say, chilling. But the additions in the latest edition make it even more so. If you read earlier editions, you might want to read the intro to the new one because he mentions things edited out of the original.

In Night Wiesel describes in considerable detail the experience of the freight car taking him to the Auschwitz. Everything about the experience was dehumanizing, mile by mile stripping away the humanity of the Jews not only in the eyes of the German guards, but even in the eyes of the Jews themselves. In many ways Dan Pagis’ poem is rehumanizing those who went through the experience, by framing it in terms of a Biblical incident that supposedly frames human origins. When I read the description of the freight cars in Night I kept returning to this poem, contrasting these two portrayals of the same experience in my mind. Both are born of the same experience but in many ways they are mirror images: the dehumanizing, “humans as freight” experience, and the experience that encompasses all of humanity, thus rehumanlizing those who experienced those freight cars. They are not contradictory versions, but are two sides of the exact same experience: the narrow one of what the experience meant right at the time to those directly involved, and the expansion of that highly personal experience to put it into the context of human nature and human history in general. What we do to each other now replays the family tragedy of the Biblical myth.