“What would you do?”
I looked forward to this trip as a teacher of history and government, anticipating a wealth of knowledge and personal stories of victims and survivors. I learned all this, made new friends, and discovered how much I don’t know about many things, especially about the Jewish faith and identity. More profound, however, was what I experienced that touched not my mind, but my soul. As we travelled through Berlin, Dresden, and Prague, walking the same streets where both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust once walked, a voice repeatedly echoed in my head: “What would you do?” Whose voice? The collective spirit of those who suffered unspeakable crimes? The energy – never destroyed, so science tells us – generated from the guilt of those who crafted this evil, or stood by and endorsed it with silence? Was it my own conscience? God?
Sometimes the voice was a whisper, caught on the edge of the breeze as I gazed at street signs in Berlin’s Bavarian Quarter that chronicled the sinuous path of cutting the Jews out of Germany’s social fabric. As clear as today’s universal circled cigarette with a slash that no language needs to translate, a simple placard on a post with a line drawing of a loaf of bread (“Jews can only buy food at certain times”) and of musical notes (“Jews cannot participate in choirs”). Emotionless laws excluded Jews from life in unobtrusive ways, without drama and theatrics. An early first step for the Nazis to erase the Jews from the collective culture. For the average German, it would have been subtle, perhaps easy to push out of one’s mind and pretend not to notice. “What would you do?” the voice in my head asked.
Kathedrale Sanctissimae Trinitatis (Cathedral of the Holy Trinity), a breathtaking baroque cathedral next to the Elbe River and less than a minute’s walk from our hotel, is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dresden-Meissen in Dresden, Germany. This church stood sentry over the Saxony region of Germany since the 1700s, bearing witness to the transport of hundreds of residents to their executions during WWII. During the Nazi reign, some thirty percent of Christian clergy in occupied territories were murdered along with so many others. I wondered what the priest and parishioners of this church (in the ‘40s not yet elevated to seat of the diocese) had done when their neighbors were sent away. Expecting to enter the church and explore the artistry of another century, I instead heard the resonance of the priest calling the congregation to Saturday evening mass. Genuflecting, I slipped into a rear side pew, trying not to rattle my shopping bags and camera case too much (such a tourist!), realizing that though the mass was being said in German, I knew exactly where we were. The Our Father chanted in German has the same cadence as in English, and so my words came not from my brain, but from my heart. A girl about the age of my own daughter and her father were the only others in my pew, and she smiled shyly at me, then became more bold and shuffled over to offer her little hand at the sign of peace. The priest smiled as he placed the Holy Communion in my hands, erasing my self-consciousness for the rumpled shorts and t-shirt I was wearing. On another continent, in another language, I was home within that church. After mass, I lit a candle at the feet of the Virgin Mary, just as my daughter and I do every week. As I knelt, the voice in my head (or was it in my heart?) came strong and determined to have an answer, “What would you do?”
In Prague, on the platform of Wilson railway station, I was struck speechless gazing at a little family of statues – man with a young boy draped across his chest, the boy’s hands clasping his shoulders, a little girl standing solemnly next to them, one suitcase at their feet. Sir Nicholas Winton, in 1938 a 29-year old London stock broker, arranged for the exodus of almost 700 children from Czechoslovakia to safety with families in England. Even his own wife didn’t know what he had done until, decades later, she stumbled across the papers and documents while cleaning their house. Is the memorial to the families in Czechoslovakia – the agony of parents putting their children on a train, with nothing but blind faith that their little ones would be saved? Or to the English families who received the children – who offered safety and shelter from the Nazis, incorporating the young souls into their own families because their Czech parents disappeared into the storm of World War II? Would I have had the courage to do what Sir Nicholas had done, putting my own safety at risk? Would I have had the courage to do what those Czech parents did, sending away my child, saving her life (maybe, but no guarantee), and sending away my own heart with her? It comes now not as a voice, but as a scream. “What would you do?!”
And days later, with the distance of an ocean, I finally answer, “I don’t know.”
I thank God with every fiber in my soul that I did not live during the time the Nazis turned Europe into Hell on Earth, and so can never know what I would have done. But what is certain is that every choice I now make – to look away from suffering or to offer hope, to keep silent when unjust behavior is “not my business” or to speak up even at risk of reprisal, to remain apathetic because it simply is easier or to rise to action though I am tired – must be made so that I will not be ashamed by my answer.
