Reflections from Neshama 28

I wonder what gives a building its soul. 

 

I mean it feels like it's a lot easier of a question to answer for, like, a religious building. The soul is the Torah, if it's a synagogue. It's the literal tree of life that breathes life into the building. A synagogue without a Torah is an empty shell. It's a car without an engine, a phone with no battery, no motherboard. It's missing its power source. 

 
Today we went to a synagogue in a town called Tikochin. More than 1,500 Jews lived there, and all were killed in the span of about two days, buried in three mass graves in a nearby forest. The synagogue remained intact because the Nazis used it as stables or to store ammunition. It's unclear.

 

There is no Torah in the arc in that synagogue. 

 

The group I'm with prayed in that synagogue. Full tallis and tefillin, complete service. And all I could think of was that it felt hollow. Like we were trying to fill an empty thing, a bucket with no bottom. All I could think was that there was no Torah in the synagogue in Tikochin, and there probably never would be again.  

 

We visited the Jewish graveyard after that. It stood for 200 years more than the synagogue's 300 years, and it was in utter, absolute disrepair. 

 

According to the tour guide, it was part of a cow pasture left. 

 

The few graves still remaining were barely readable. Most were knocked over. Many that stood had the words faded or covered in mosses and lichens. 

 

It was depressing as hell. 

 

We visited the mass graves, but there isn't much to say about them. It's three fenced-off areas in an absolutely gorgeous forest where more than 500 people in each one were shot dead. We read the record from Yad Vashem of a 5-year-old girl who was buried in one of the pits. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, has a wing dedicated to at least one page of testimony to each individual victim of the Holocaust. 

 

Out of the 6 million Jewish victims and the 5 million more, Yad Vashem has only 4.5 million pages in their archives.

 

The final major stop of the day was the Treblinka II death camp. It was an alright stop, but there wasn't much to see because the Nazis had ordered the destruction of all evidence that the camp existed. The Soviets had built a memorial there a few decades after the Holocaust and I was trying to find the name of my great-grandfather's village, but couldn't. 

 

As we walked back to the bus, I turned off Airplane Mode (since it saves battery and I don't have mobile data anyway) and I got a text from Savta, probably sent a long while before, telling me that I had tons of relatives who died in Treblinka and she listed some of their names. 

 

It shocked me. Because I had walked past the desecrated mass graves where my family was buried and didn't even know until we were leaving. 

 

I deeply regret that I couldn't mourn at the memorial, but I'm happy that I knew it at least while we were in the parking lot.