Joe Fitzgerald: ‘We were no longer names, just numbers’

In Jewish homes around the world young children, gathered Saturday evening for a meal with loved ones, will ask their elders, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

It’s a tradition called seder, synonomous with a holiday called Passover, or Pesach, and it commemorates the freedom gained by ancient Jews in their exodus from Egypt and the ruthless pharaoh who kept them enslaved.

Passover! It’s a glorious celebration of freedom.

It was the favorite holiday of a dear friend named Eric who was 97 when he died in 2004.

“You don’t know what it means to someone like me to tell my story to someone like you,” he once said, not long before his passing, “because now I know that when I’m gone there’ll be one more person who heard it from an eyewitness.”

The fact he had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Austria meant nothing to the Nazis who, on a mission “to cleanse Austria of its Jews,” knocked on his door one morning at 7, telling him he had to go with them for “questioning.”

Soon he was shoved onto an overcrowded freight train, bound for the concentration camp known as Dachau.

Though he would later achieve great success here in America, Eric’s eyes would brim whenever he recalled that ride.

“I remember the fear, the humiliation. We were no longer names, just numbers. Every day, every moment, you could be killed for the slightest offense. One day storm troopers drew a line in the sand, telling us we were not allowed to cross it. Then one of them knocked off a young man’s cap; he was 20, the son of an industrialist I knew well.

“They told him, ‘Pick it up!’ When he stepped over the line to get it, they shot him dead. I saw that. I was there. It happened at Dachau.”

Eric would tell his seder guests, “To some of you, this Passover ritual may seem superfluous. You may consider it strange we spend a whole evening identifying with events that happened 3,000 years ago. But having experienced hunger, thirst, bitter cold, illness without treatment, total loss of human dignity has taught me what freedom means.

“That’s why this holiday, for me, is the greatest of all festivals.”

From Eric and millions like him who survived those death camps arose a fervent plea that still resounds today: “Never forget!”

And yet we do, don’t we?

So a bunch of high school knuckleheads in Duxbury came up with the idea of shouting “Auschwitz!” as a code word for identifying an upcoming formation

It quickly became a cause celebre in that South Shore paradise, resulting in a canceled game and a fired coach.

But was it an act of virulent hatred or a simple display of ignorance?

Did those schoolboys not fully grasp the horror of what “Auschwitz” represents, or are they merely products of a world that has shamelessly forgotten?

If they heard of Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery, would beatings, bombings and boycotts come to their minds? No? Then why would Belzic, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen gnaw at them?

Could it be a self-absorbed world no longer remembers what Eric’s generation could never forget?

God forbid. Happy Passover.

 

 

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2QHAHa6