from-auschwitzs-gate-of-hell

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For her, and for others, there was still anger that needed to be voiced – not directed at the German architects of the plan to eliminate the world’s Jews, but at a world that had stood by and let it happen. “Where was everybody?” asked Dagan. “Where was the world, who could see everything and yet did nothing to save all those thousands?” She was interrupted by applause.
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This was not Renee’s first trip back. She has made the trek to Auschwitz often, despite admitting: “I can’t even begin to tell you how much I hate it.” Before every visit, including this one, “I get so nervous, it feels terrible.” She gestured towards her abdomen, to indicate the knot in her stomach. Asked if this would be her last visit, she nodded before saying: “At my age, I don’t make any plans.”

And yet she forced herself to return, pulled there by the same sense of obligation that tugged at so many of the remaining survivors. “I feel I have to. If I survived, I need to come back to show people what happened.”

She shares the fear of many survivors too that once they have gone, once living memory becomes dead history, the power of the Shoah will fade, that people will forget its agony and its lessons. They worry that even though the attempted elimination of the Jews was one of the most documented crimes in human history, that it will lose its force once there are no longer living, breathing human beings around to say: “I was there.”

But she looks around today’s world and worries that all the testimony and all the evidence are not working anyway. Recent acts of terror, murderous acts of violence, including against Jews, have left their mark on her. “I know that the world hasn’t learned from our experience,” she said. “It’s forgetting.”