“In Europe, we don’t talk about the Holocaust in past tense”

Standing on the banks of the Danube at sunset in front of Budapest’s famous Shoe Memorial, I held two complementary thoughts in my mind.  The first came from this morning at the Scheiber Sandor School when a high school student told me that she transferred to the school only last year because she had been the victim of anti-Semitism at her public school.  The second thought came from a speaker we heard that afternoon.  The speaker, who had organized a program to promote positive relationships between young Hungarian Jews and Catholics, said: “In Europe we don’t talk about the Holocaust in the past tense.”

It is easy to become complacent about the obligation to remember the Holocaust.  It is tempting to think, “I have seen enough Holocaust films, listened to enough Holocaust survivors, and stood in front of enough Holocaust memorials.”  But that attitude changes quickly when you realize while that the Allies defeated the Nazis and their accomplices in World War II, anti-Semitism survives.

That point became more than words today.  The day-long walking tour of Budapest’s old Jewish neighborhood, included a memorial to Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat who saved Hungarian Jews during World War II, a map that charts the Jewish ghetto in Budapest during the Holocaust, and the story of Nicholas Winton, a British businessman, who modestly saved Hungarian Jewish children from deportation to concentration camps.

It ended as the sun set at the Shoe Memorial on the banks of the Danube, which commemorates the Jews of Budapest, who in the middle of a Hungarian winter were marched down to the river’s edge and shot into the freezing water by members of the pro-Nazi Hungarian sympathizers, the Iron Cross.  Those who did not die by bullets were pushed into the bitter cold waters of the Danube by the weight of their fellow Jews’ falling corpses.

Abel, our tour guide, who is also a student at the Scheiber Sandor School, told our group that there are videos of contemporary right-wing Hungarian politicians urinating and spitting on the Shoe Memorial.  So, when the afternoon speaker said, “In Europe, we don’t talk about the Holocaust in past tense” those words are not empty.  And when the Scheiber Sandor student told me that she transferred to a Jewish day school to escape anti-Semitism at her public school, her experience is not without context.

Yet the day also included students from Beth Tfiloh and Scheiber Sandor bentsching together, using the same tunes and hand motions for Birkat HaMazon.  And it included a stop in front of the Rumbach Synagogue, with scaffolds covering the front of it as it is being refurbished after decades of damage and neglect at the hands of the Iron Cross and the Communists.  And it ended with dinner with the rabbi of the Hunyadi Ter Shteibel, who told me that 60 Budapest Jews regularly come to his synagogue every Friday night.  So while anti-Semitism survived World War II, the Jews survived the Holocaust.

I write these words on a day when my eighteen-year-old daughter visited the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland with the rest of the young women from her seminary.  She is studying this year in Jerusalem and her seminary is visiting important Jewish sites in Poland for a week.  She, along with the students of Beth Tfiloh and Scheiber Sandor, are planting the roots of Judaism so deep that no amount of hatred, now or in the future, will ever uproot it.

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