Thanks for this moving and thought-provoking piece, Keith. You hit on something that is difficult to articulate about Holocaust memory and a memorial trip like ours. The thing that sticks with me is that in the normal course of things we wouldn't expect to know much about our great grandparents, but because of the way their whole world was torn from them and destroyed that absence matters more.
I have read and re-read your excellent article. Chelmno and other places we visited on the tour keep going round and round in my head. I went for a walk with my wife in our local park this morning. I explained to her that it was not unlike the burial grounds at Chelmno with the exception of the fact that there are not 200,000 buried underneath and it does not display all those memorials. That fact was difficult to get one's head around. Many of my relatives died there but, like you, I never knew any of them. A member of my grandmother's family, Mordechai Zurowski, was at Chelmno and escaped keeping a diary of the atrocities. He was later a key witness at the Eichmann Trial in 1961. His name appears on a number of the notices around Chelmno. It was the same with the shtetls. It was always difficult to believe my family ever lived there. Despite the hospitality of the local people towards us, how does one form an emotional attachment to a place of which one has had no previous experience?
Thanks for this moving and thought-provoking piece, Keith. You hit on something that is difficult to articulate about Holocaust memory and a memorial trip like ours. The thing that sticks with me is that in the normal course of things we wouldn't expect to know much about our great grandparents, but because of the way their whole world was torn from them and destroyed that absence matters more.
I have read and re-read your excellent article. Chelmno and other places we visited on the tour keep going round and round in my head. I went for a walk with my wife in our local park this morning. I explained to her that it was not unlike the burial grounds at Chelmno with the exception of the fact that there are not 200,000 buried underneath and it does not display all those memorials. That fact was difficult to get one's head around. Many of my relatives died there but, like you, I never knew any of them. A member of my grandmother's family, Mordechai Zurowski, was at Chelmno and escaped keeping a diary of the atrocities. He was later a key witness at the Eichmann Trial in 1961. His name appears on a number of the notices around Chelmno. It was the same with the shtetls. It was always difficult to believe my family ever lived there. Despite the hospitality of the local people towards us, how does one form an emotional attachment to a place of which one has had no previous experience?