There are many ways to remember

 Participants of  Marche de la Memoire, September 2014

Reading about the Holocaust is like staring at the sun – you can only look at a tiny piece or you will damage yourself.

The numbers are too big. The actions are too terrible. The overview is terrifying.  I try not to look too much. 

This September I couldn’t avoid seeing a little.  Along with two other members of my synagogue, I walked the annual Marche de la Memoire from St Martin de Vesubie in France, up a steep and rocky mountain path in the Alps, and down the other side towards Valdieri in Italy. 

It is a challenging hike, but not too tough to notice the carpet of pink flowers on the rocky ascent.

I have no idea what they are called – they were just small, pretty, Alpine flowers and I imagine they bloom there every year at the same time in the late summer.

At the top of the mountain, we gathered with hundreds of French and Italian people, remembering atrocities done there once, and atrocities still done around the world.  

On the stones behind us, there were photos of some of the Jewish children of the area who had been captured, and killed at Auschwitz.  

Apparently in previous years, someone had said Kaddish, but not this year.  This year, an Italian girl read a poem she had written and another played Hatikvah on her violin.  A historian, eyewitnesses and a survivor spoke. They read out the names of some of the murdered children.

They played Hatikvah again.  A few people hummed along.  I felt like I was the only one singing.

A few of us put a stone onto a pile of stones on the peak. It is our way to remember by leaving a stone on the gravestone.

Behind the speakers, photos of some of the murdered children were wedged into the rocks.

Remembering the Jews of St Martin de Vesubie

In September 1943, nearly 4 million European Jews had already been murdered.  Some were working as slaves. The rest of the Jews of Europe were hiding or running. Nowhere was safe for very long.    

One tiny area became a haven for a few months.  South East France, under Italian military control, refused to surrender Jews to the German SS or to the French Vichy administration.

1,200 Jewish refugees made it to the safe Italian zone and were moved to St Martin de Vesubie. With support from Jewish charities like the Joint, they spent that summer living as free Jews.  They established schools and synagogues. They sat in cafes and organised dances. 

To get there, all of them had made hundreds of critical decisions -who to trust, when to go, when to hide, who to pay.  On the 8^th of September 1943, there was another critical decision to be made.

Italy had surrendered to the Allies. The Italian occupying forces in France, who had protected the Jews for ten months, began to retreat home over the mountains.  

1000 of the Jews from St Martin de Vesubie decided to go with them. For three days they hiked over the Alps hoping to meet Allied troops on the other side.  It was a hard climb, carrying small children and bundles of belongings. Some dumped their belongings as they went. Some turned back. 

But the Allies weren’t yet there to save them and they were rounded up by the Germans.

One third of the Jews that made the trek were arrested, deported to Auschwitz and killed. Two thirds went into hiding in Italy.

All of the Jews that stayed behind in St Martin de Vesubie were deported to Auschwitz and killed.

 Cairn at the top of the Col

Remembering a journey

Serge Klarsfeld's French children of the Holocaust outlines what is known about the children taken on the 75 massive train convoys that went from France to the death camps.   

It lists the names and ages of the children, as well as where they were taken from.  

(If you want to break your heart, look at the photos of the some of the children)

Here is the description for convoy 64 which left Drancy on December 7, 1943:

Convoy 64 deported 156 children - 79 boys and 77 girls. As with those deported on convoy 62, most had been arrested in the countryside. Almost half were brought from a gathering point in the Côte d'Azur: they had fled St.-Martin-de-Vésubie, on the French side of the border with Italy, into Italy, only to be caught by Germans newly occupying the Italian towns.

The entire list of the children on convoy 64 is given.

I can see two names from the long list. 

Joseph and Suzanne Katz aged eight and five. Their last address is given as St Martin de Vesubie.    

There are no photos of them. 

In my imagination, they are walking up the mountain together.  They can see the pink flowers carpeting their rocky ascent.  They are not tired or hungry. They are full of hope.

Remembering in hope

Hatikvah, or Hope, is the national anthem of Israel

As long as Jewish spirit

Yearns deep in the heart,

With the eye turning east,

Looking towards Zion

Our hope is not yet lost,

The hope of two thousand years,

To be a free nation in our land,

The land of Zion and Jerusalem

Remembering one child

  Germaine Steinlauf has no headstone on this earth, but for one hour a year, she has a mountain.

  

Germaine was born in Nice, in the South of France.  When she was 12, she was deported to Auschwitz by train which left Drancy on February 10, 1944.  There were 1,500 people on that convoy, of whom 295 were children. 

 She was one of the 16 Jewish girls taken from her school in Nice.

She was one of the 11,400 Jewish children who were deported from France to death camps in Europe by train.

The train cars were tightly packed. There was no food, water or toilets.

On arrival at Auschwitz, she was selected for death and gassed immediately.  Her body was burned.

Her train, convoy 68, was one of 75 train convoys from France to the death camps.

Auschwitz was one of the death camps.

The death camps were one of the methods used to kill Jewish people.

France was one of the thirteen countries where Jewish people lost their right to live.

Germaine was one of the one million Jewish children murdered.

She was one of the six million Jewish people who were murdered.

Most of the bodies of the six million were burned or thrown into mass graves.

Most have no headstones on earth. Most left no photographs of their lives. Entire families were murdered with no one left to remember them. 

It is too much to fathom.

Remembering where we are

There are many ways to remember.  And none of us can remember the whole story. 
It is too big and too terrible. 

All we can do is look at a tiny bit and pass it on. Like placing a small stone on a cairn on a stony mountain, to remind people that come along later that there were people that were once here , and that their memory is still part of our  story. 

Their lives counted and their anguish was seen.

They are not forgotten, and we are not lost.

The incredible flowers on the path up to Col de Cerise

A documentary about the flight of the Jews from St Martin de Vesubie was made by Andre Waksman, whose own family survived the Holocaust in the Italian zone, is easy to download:

http://www.filmsdocumentaires.com/vod/a1b0577ba134f36fb29cd199

Photo credits: Bruce Rigal and Eric Weger