It is widely known that trains and train stations had a traumatic effect on the Jewish people. Even the movie Paperclips honors Shoah deaths by collecting 6 million Paperclips in a train-car-turned museum. At Yad Vashem, we learned about the twisted Nazi plot that tricked Macedonian Jews into buying their own train tickets to the death camps. This is not even to detail the detailed experiences of suffocation, starvation, and disease endured by the Jews on their journeys to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Treblinka. Yet, in my brief time in Israel, we were directed to train stations twice to relax, to enjoy life. In both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv the old train stations (some of which were once part of the Hijaz Rail, which ran from Damascus to Mecca) have been converted to hip and trendy outdoor cafés and shopping areas. In Tel Aviv, people rented segways, whole large groups of strangers gathered to dance the Hatikva (“The Hope”, Israel’s national anthem and dance), to a band playing in the center of restaurants and craft vendors. What might have come to represent misery now lives on as a celebration of life.
This post was originally posted at my travel blog Israel 2014: an Educator’s Study Tour