I never met a Jew I didn't like

There are newspaper columns for which I have ideas, sometimes good ideas, but for one reason or another don’t get written, not, at least, right away.

This is one of those columns. In fact, I first proposed the idea for it in 2003 to Sarah Rigg, the editor of “The View” back then.

At the time, it would have been my first column, and for that reason, and for the potentially controversial nature of the column itself, Sarah suggested I get my picture taken and published in the newspaper, to accompany my new column.

And the point of this column is: I have learned over the years, in and out of school, about how Jews have sometimes been mistreated by the larger cultures in which they live. You may point to the Spanish Inquisition, or the Pogroms in Russia; but the whole sordid, shameful mess was punctuated by the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

And I have asked myself, “Why?” And I continue to ask to this day. I still don’t get it.

Because I never met a Jew I didn’t like. I haven’t known many Jews, to be sure, but the ones I’ve known, and what I’ve learned about how they live their lives, well, I’ve seen nothing to cause my ancestors to single them out for the kinds of persecution that I’ve read about.

Now, Adolf Hitler wrote a whole book about his reasoning why the Jews should be blamed for many things, and I’m reading it now: “Mein Kampf,” or, “My Struggle.”

And I’m reading the Bible, and I can see from that that the Jews, based on what I see in the Old Testament, viewed themselves as a chosen people, with a unique set of cultural practices that often distinguished them from the larger cultures in which they lived.

In fact, last night, on Holy Thursday, we were reminded in the Readings of the first Passover, in which Jewish households in Egypt were spared divine retribution, using blood smeared on the house entrance as a sign that the house was to be spared.

So what? I still don’t get it. I have thought perhaps that it stems from jealousy, using the stereotypes of Jews as successful, no-nonsense businesspeople or bankers or moneylenders, like the character “Shylock” in Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice.” Or, perhaps some blamed them for Christ’s persecution and crucifixion.

I needed to learn more, I thought, to understand this, so I visited the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills in January, and followed up with a second visit in February.

Frankly, the visits drove home to me the depth and the range of the hatred for Jews, but failed to provide a good understanding of why they were selected for Hitler’s unprecedented mass cruelty.

  

Maybe I’ll find something in “Mein Kampf” that makes sense. But all I’ve seen so far is cockamamie theories on racial purity and the Jews’ supposed support for Marxism. Hitler had no use for Marxism.

The Holocaust Memorial Center is easily reached via I-275 and I-696 at 28123 Orchard Lake Road, just north of 12 Mile Road. At night, the building is illuminated by lights, and it looks as if barbed wire surrounds the building, as if it were a concentration camp. Very chilling.

My daughter Kelly and I visited the center on Martin Luther King Day. A donation to the center is suggested by a small box as you enter, but otherwise admission is free.

There is a daily guided tour at 1 p.m. that lasts for about two hours, followed by a talk with a Holocaust survivor.

Kelly and I took the tour, figuring that would be the best way to get introduced to the place. The guide was very good, peppering us with questions, facts and ideas that better informed us and challenged our assumptions about what we thought we knew.

The talk with the Holocaust survivor was perhaps the best part of the visit. She was a woman in her 80’s, who had lived in Hungary with her family before World War II.

When the war arrived, she explained, Germany used Hungary as a resource, particularly for food for its armies, so Hungary was initially spared the Nazi occupation and the active persecution of Jews experienced by other countries in Europe.

But that ended in 1944, she said, when the Nazi armies arrived to occupy and control the territory, bringing with them the persecution of Jews visited on other countries in Europe.

The woman and her mother hid from the Nazis in the homes of non-Jewish friends, but they couldn’t stay in one place for long, because they were exposing their hosts to being discovered, so they moved around several times to elude the Nazis.

The Holocaust survivor explained that her story was similar to that of Anne Frank in Holland, except that Anne Frank didn’t survive.

Frank wrote a celebrated diary of her experience with her family, having been hidden by friends until they were discovered in August 1944. Anne and her family were separated and sent to concentration camps, where they died before Germany’s surrender in May 1945.

Our survivor at the Holocaust Center was released at the war’s end, and re-united with her husband-to-be. They emigrated to the U.S. in 1946, and brought her mother over in 1951.

 A few weeks after my first visit to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, I returned to the center for a second look, and it was then, alone with my thoughts as I moved through the history of Judaism and the persecution of Jews culminating in the Holocaust, I experienced a visceral reaction that resides with me to this day.

The design of the building is interesting. The beginning of the self-guided tour is flooded with light, as you move from the lobby entrance to a large, brightly-illuminated room which describes the history of the Jews. On the clear Lucite wall that curves and conforms to the room, events in Jewish history are shown immediately below concurrent major events in World History, as you make your way from right to left through history. It’s very interesting, and it’s chock full of information.

What follows in the next room, a tad darker than the previous rooms, is a closer examination of Judaism itself: how it began, what it believes, including its sacred texts and theologians; its holidays, most of which I’ve heard of, but don’t understand real well, and some famous Jews throughout history.

Because that’s the only thing the word “Jew” represents: a religion, like Catholicism or Protestantism. It’s not an ethnic group, or a race; it’s not a language; it’s not a country. It is a religion.

As you proceed through the tour, one of the pleasant stops is a tiny theater, with seating for maybe 15 people, which shows the history of Jewish theater early in the 20th century. It’s a pleasant entertainment that lasts for a few minutes, as you sit in a comfortably-upholstered chair enjoying the story, the respite and a chance to sit down.

What awaits you, however, is a decidedly uncomfortable descent into Hell.

I knew the layout of the place from my visit in January, but I didn’t feel the previous journey as I did on my own that day.

You come to a narrow hallway, just a few feet wide and 50 feet long. The narrow floor descends slowly, gradually toward darkness. The hallway has a very tall ceiling, made taller still as you descend down the hallway.

There are brief stories that line both walls about how the warning signs of increasing persecution of the Jews in Germany in the 1930’s were largely ignored by the world, including the U.S. and the Catholic Church. You wonder when it ends; you want to move on, as you’re made increasingly uncomfortable by the stories.

As you look for a way out, a way to ease your discomfort, your eye is drawn to the wall at the end of the narrow hallway. This wall, narrow as it is, feels extraordinarily tall because, as the entrance of the hallway descends slowly toward the end of the hallway, the wall at the end is about double the height of the entrance.

 And at the end of the hallway, your eyes are drawn toward it; you are staring at a larger-than-life, 20-foot photo of Adolf Hitler, looking very official in full military regalia. His height, and his power, is accentuated by the narrow width of the photo.

You are foursquare in the presence of evil, and it is at once transfixing, even as it startles you.

You have entered Hell, and the rest of the journey through this Hell is emotionally draining and perplexing. There follows a room that is a replica of a concentration camp, surrounded by barbed wire.

Next, you walk into a room that replicates the railroad cars that transported millions of Jews to camps run by the Nazis. The room vibrates, suggesting a train car moving through the countryside, accompanied by train whistles and flashing yellow lights. There is no escape at this point.

You walk into a cave like room on a narrow ramp. It has a low ceiling with photos that flash on the wall to your left. The photos, several of which are shown at the same time on the screen, appear, disappear, and are replaced by more horrific photos of the grisly results of the Nazis’ treatment of Jews – cadaverous bodies with protruding hipbones and gaunt faces, suffering souls   whose eyes seem enlarged by the thinness of their surrounding features. Some bodies are living; some are dead; some are carelessly piled on each other.

Your senses, your reason, your humanity is now actively being assaulted. You walk into another small theater, but this one does not feature show music and comfortable seats. The seats in this theater are narrow pieces of wood. You cannot sit on the tall seats, because you will fall off, although you may rest on them in a standing position. You are intentionally made to feel uncomfortable.

And the screen in this room features more horrific footage showing how a single madman deluded the entire globe, wiping out over half the Jews then living in Europe. In some countries, like Poland, Hitler and his accomplices exterminated 90 percent of the Jews.

You are ashamed for yourself, for your forebears. Why didn’t someone do something? Why didn’t someone at least say something? Why did six million die at the hands of a mediocrity, who also visited so much suffering on the rest of the world?

Were we all accomplices?

There are no satisfactory answers, as you move again toward the light in a slow, gradual ascent toward the end of the tour. The wall on the left shows the names of people who helped, who risked their lives to help the Jews.

The list includes a man named Varian Fry, a U.S. citizen living in France who helped thousands escape from occupied France to the U.S. You are mildly heartened and encouraged as you read about these personal acts of heroism.

And you’re left with a question, and a resolve.

The question: if I had witnessed and experienced this, what would I have done?

And the resolve, the animating force that guided the Jews as they forged the state of Israel after World War II, and the clarion call that should animate each of us whenever we witness unreasoned hatred, or bigotry, or active persecution of innocents: NEVER AGAIN.