June 12



POLAND:

A Trench Runs Through It

After my uncles, aunts, cousins and, probably, grandmother were gassed in
1942 in Belzec, a German death camp in Poland, their remains were dumped
into mass graves there, together with those of at least 500,000 other
Jews. That small site, about 15 acres, is one of the most concentrated
zones of death in the world.

In the past 15 years I've gone to Belzec five times to visit those remains
and say Kaddish for the dead. Now a trench, about 30 feet deep and open at
both ends, has been dug into the ground between the mass graves.
Stretching through the heart of the camp, it's the central element of a
memorial that was unveiled last week.

The trench lets people not only visit the remains of the dead but go deep
into the earth and walk among them. Some have argued that after years of
increasing exposure to Holocaust museums and movies, the public has
developed "Holocaust fatigue"; the trench would intensify the experience,
making visitors feel, as the victims felt, trapped and doomed.

This is, for me, a stupefying idea. One visits a grave site; one doesn't
invade it. But that is what the memorial has done. In the digging of the
trench, the surface soil, much of it ash and bone, was disturbed. Workers
discarded some of the human remains.

And the greatest invasion is yet to come. Tourists will pass through the
trench. Some will be moved. Others, like schoolchildren on class trips,
will be noisy. And they'll be walking between mass graves containing the
incinerated remains of tens of thousands of people.

In their last moments, those dead were tortured beyond anything we can
imagine. Transported from ghettos in cattle cars, they were forced, once
at Belzec, to undress. They were then chased through a narrow passage
between barbed wire, past a gantlet of screaming guards with whips, who
herded them into the gas chambers.

And after the carbon monoxide? One SS officer described a gassing of 3,000
Jews in 1942. The dead, he recalled, stood "erect like basalt columns, for
there is no room to fall or to collapse," adding: "Even in death, one can
recognize the families, holding hands. It is only with difficulty that
they can be separated to make room in the chambers for the next
transport."

Neither those 3,000 nor the other hundreds of thousands of Holocaust dead
in Belzec needed this trench. A strong fence should have been built around
the site to keep everyone out. A memorial structure, bearing a sign
explaining what happened in Belzec, should have been erected nearby. And
the dead should have been left undisturbed, forever. But the deed is done.
The trench is open. Tourists will surge through it. And I'll continue to
visit, standing outside, saying Kaddish for those tortured dead.


(source: Op-Ed, New York Times--Walter Reich, a professor of
international affairs at George Washington University, was the director
of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 1998)