A Visit to the Holocaust Memorial Center

 

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere. ~ Primo Levi

A renovated boxcar is set on rails embedded in the floor where we enter the Holocaust Memorial Center. Two hundred people might have once crammed inside to start a three- to six-day journey in stifling heat or freezing cold. They may have anticipated resettlement somewhere, unaware they were about to lose their names and identities, that they’d become mere numbers, that these days could be their last. Or since they had friends or family they’d never heard from, maybe some did suspect.

Nobody knows for sure if this particular car was once packed with Jews, but it’s one of the last existing World War II-era German boxcars. It’s the same type the Nazis used. I linger alone, tiptoe around it, dare to reach out and touch it, feel the lock, stroke the door and walls. My eyes well.  I’m barely breathing.

Our next stop is in the circular room that displays a timeline of Jewish history, beginning with Abraham’s migration from Haran to Canaan, juxtaposed with milestones in world history in a way that hints that the world fiddled while the Jews burned. Of course, how could the world know the extent of the extermination when the news was buried in the papers? We later learn that The New York Times published a full-page apology on November 14, 2001 . . .

I’ve been awfully quiet lately, I know, but I’m writing over at Tweetspeak Poetry today about a visit we took in April to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Follow me there?

 

In the stillness,

Sandy