Reflections on a journey to Auschwitz with Renee

AUSCHWITZ, Poland — It was like an opera set, the soft blue and pink lighting setting off the grandeur of the stone facade. Rows of seats for the audience straddled the train tracks bisecting the enormous white tent. The tracks gave the feeling of an aisle, maybe for a wedding, swallowed up by the Gate of Death’s gaping mouth.

There were two entrances to the huge tent built to hold the over 3,000 expected for the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation. Holocaust survivors were to enter on the left, their more youthful companions to the right.

It’s clear there was no malevolence intended in the Polish government organizers’ separation between the survivors and their companions. It was rather an artistic sensibility which wanted to utilize the survivors as stage props as a sea of grey heads for the simultaneous international television broadcasts.

But still.

“Seventy years later, some Pole is still telling me what to do!” Auschwitz survivor Renee Gancz exclaimed over a late-night dinner several hours after the ceremony.

Renee’s father, brother, and entire extended family were slaughtered here at Auschwitz-Birkenau; she and her mother miraculously survived. It was her first time back.

When I met Renee and her husband Shmuel Gabor in their Tel Aviv home in mid-January ahead of the trip, we’d discussed taking a tour of the camp together the day after the ceremony. But after the emotionally and physically strenuous journey from Krakow to Auschwitz and back that day, the 87-year-old grandmother was less keen to travel there yet again.

“I want to see life! I want to see people!” she told me and decided to take a tour of Krakow instead.

Late that night, actually very early morning, after a few more cups of wine than I usually imbibe, I asked her if she thought it was always better to look to the light and away from the dark.

“Always,” she said without hesitation.

Renee is a saucy lady who loves to laugh. She poked fun at my wine-rosy cheeks and confided she enjoys a nip of whiskey with her still young 99-year-old husband — and a good dance or two.

My own mother was an equal lover of life, but died after an arduous battle against breast cancer this April. We had a very strong, very open relationship and talked every week for hours. She always asked me when I debated doing something: was it was life-affirming, or life-taking?

I suspect seeing Auschwitz close up was both.

We all stood at Auschwitz

I am a Jewish-German-Scotch-Irish-American mutt. But I only learned about the Jewish part when I was nine years old.

My mother, born to a Jewish family affiliated with the Reform movement for generations, was a spiritual seeker. As family lore has it, her journey took her to participate in an interfaith convention between Catholics and Jews shortly after she had been confirmed at her local Long Island temple. There she met and fell in love with a good Catholic boy.

With the support of Catholic friends, one who was close to her until the end, and a local family for whom she had done babysitting, my mother converted to Catholicism at age 18.

Mom and the boy were eventually “pinned” — a precursor to engagement — and she left her vocal performance studies at Juilliard (where she’d been in the same musical theory class as a young Itzhak Perlman) and moved with him to Los Angeles.

Luckily for me, the relationship didn’t last, and she eventually met and married my dad (not Jewish, not religious), also a classical musician. But Mom had already irrevocably stepped away from Judaism, which she seemed to always view as a semi-soulless religion.

So how did I end up a Jewish-Israeli journalist covering the World Jewish Congress’s Israeli delegation to Auschwitz?

At age nine, my Catholic Sunday school teacher phoned my mother and told her I was spreading heresy in class. I’d been telling the pupils that I just didn’t believe Jesus was the messiah. I’d said, ok, God, maybe. But this son of God idea? Not so much. It did not ring true for me.

In a family powwow, we struck a deal and my mom said I could stop going to Sunday school if I began reading about religions. My dad, who at that point called himself an agnostic, took me to the local Port Moody, British Columbia, library where I read Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha.” I thought it moving, but not enough to propel me toward a new lifestyle.

It was like a missing piece of me slid into place

I continued reading and dabbling until I found in a comparative religions text an explanation of Judaism. This was it, I excitedly told my dad, who in turn told me that actually, according to Jewish law, or halacha, I was Jewish.

It was like a missing piece of me slid into place.

As a family, it was agreed that I’d finish the Catholic rites of passage, but from age 14 I’ve been calling myself — with varied levels of observance — a Jew.

I think what drove my mom crazy about my decision to raise myself Jewish (“What are you trying to do, drive daggers into my heart?!” was said a couple of times) was that I am not actually a religious practitioner.

In becoming a Jew — reclaiming my Jewishness? — I had decided, essentially, to bind my fate to the Jewish people.

And as I learned when handed a stack of books for my Introduction to Judaism class in the Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, learning about the Jewish people means learning a lot about the Holocaust.

As a neighbor in my Judean Desert village told me upon my return from Krakow, “I’ve never been to Poland, but all Jews have stood at Sinai, and at Auschwitz.”

A factory of death

Before this trip to Poland, my first, I’d contacted my former History of the Holocaust teacher at Indiana University, where I graduated as a Jewish Studies major. Prof. John Efron currently teaches at UC Berkeley and in a lengthy late-night phone call, I asked him if he had any lingering impressions of his first pilgrimage to Auschwitz.

“You get a better sense of the crime and largeness of the historical project the Nazis set for themselves by the sheer enormity of the place,” Efron told me. “The size and scale are equally proportionate to the size and magnitude of the crime perpetrated there.”

Auschwitz is actually a complex combination of some 48 camps. There were the three infamous extermination facilities, and another 45 satellites which served forced labor factories.

Many of the Israeli survivors who toured the camp with me last week had worked at one of the factories. Ranging from their early 80s to late 90s, they were children or teens when ripped away from their families and taken to Birkenau.

Many were overcome on this tour. Some were able to see the museum at Auschwitz 1, but remained on the bus in the parking lot of Auschwitz-Birkenau where they had lived in hell. For the majority it was their first trip back, other than the theatrical ceremony the previous day.

After the ceremony I’d phoned my husband, who was back in Israel minding our six kids, and told him — bewildered, relieved — that I hadn’t felt anything being in Auschwitz that day.

“It just goes to show a place has what meaning you give it,” I’d said.

But standing side by side with these survivors, walking down the endless snow-covered muddy roads with their former, crumbling barracks at our left and right, it was impossible not to be infested by the horror of this industrialized murder.

I used my journalist’s psychopathic detachment at the camp to protect me as much as possible. I asked questions, I listened, I observed.

But as the survivors spontaneously sang “Hatikva” at the Birkenau memorial next to the rubble of two crematoria, I let myself join in.

Raw emotion. Blink. Determination. Blink. Tears. Blink. Despondency. Blink. Hope. Blink. I want to go home. Blink. To Israel.

I braided my eldest daughter’s waist-length hair before school a few hours after returning from Auschwitz. Visions of piles of severed manes of all colors flashed before my eyes.

I cannot unsee what I’ve seen.

Before this trip, Renee told me in her sunny Tel Aviv apartment that for Jews, one eye always laughs while one eye cries.

Before the flight home, I make tentative plans on the airplane to go see her and her equally exuberant daughter in Tel Aviv, soon. “Maybe Chinese,” she said, followed by window shopping at swank Kikar Hamedina.

I understand why Renee always looks to the light.