The Children's Memorial

Well, today was quite a day! We started with two lectures; one on The Decision to Kill the Jews - The Final Solution and Its Implementation and the other asking and attempting to answer the question "How Was It Humanly Possible?" Both very heavy topics. After lunch we visited the Children's Memorial. The memorial was beautifully designed but the knowledge that one and a half million innocent children were murdered in the Holocaust was too much for most of the group. To enter the memorial you walk through a picturesque garden and as soon as you enter you walk through in darkness. Everybody entered with dry eyes and everyone was crying on the other side. The first haunting images you are greeted with are the faces of lost children as you enter the memorial. As you walk through the memorial you move through a section that is filled with what looks like starlight all around you and haunting voices read out the names of the deceased children and their ages. It was incredibly moving.

After the memorial we went back into the classroom to learn about an educational unit called the Auschwitz Album. It follows the progress of one transportation to Auschwitz in 1944 and uses photographs, letters and testimonies as historical documents. The content of this lecture was deeply upsetting and we left school today feeling totally deflated.

Before we went home we did go for a tour through the Holocaust Art Museum and amidst all the discussion of death and destruction we saw the art works that victims created in the ghettos in defiance of their oppressors. Victims created art to leave some testimony of what life was like for them in the ghettos.

This final picture was drawn by a 16 year old boy who imagined what it might be like to live on the moon and look up at the Earth that he had escaped.

This was a very quick tour and I will go back on Monday and spend more time really enjoying the artworks on display.

The second lecture on "How Was It Humanly Possible?" was about the annihilation of the Jews throughout Europe and how the Germans exterminated Jews throughout Europe. The Professor who gave this lecture is completing a project that tracks each and every deportation from beginning to end throughout Europe and he spoke of many of his current projects and one of his recent tasks was to track the deportation of the Macedonian Jews, in particular those from Florina. As my grandparents are from this area I thought it might be interesting to do a little of my own research. I found out that Macedonian Jews were rounded up and taken in late April 1943 and the train arrived in Auschwitz on May the 7th 1943. Upon arrival 538 Jews from Florina were murdered in the gas chambers. The following photos are from The Valley of the Communities and Florina is represented by Skopje (on the wall it is written as Skoplje). The region back then was called Thessaloniki. I have included photos of all the walls from this region in case anybody back home knows of any of these other village names.

When we got back to the hotel a few of us went back into the Old City and bought a few more souvenirs and then we went and had a pasta dinner for a change from the hotel buffet. Yum! As you can see the Old City was very quiet tonight. We mostly saw army and police and very few tourists or locals.

Tomorrow we have a short day at school as it is Shabbat and then some of us will attend Synagogue in the late afternoon before the Shabbat feast at the hotel. Tomorrow we are told that there will be a live choir singing at the service. In the afternoon I will have a much needed rest and begin to write my proposal. Nearly there!!