Observances and Rituals:
From watching them, to being with them

By Lauren Matthew
The Jewish State

There's something specific I need to do, and I keep saying I need to do it.

Actually, there are a great many things in my life I need to do -- some more serious and urgent than others. But this is something that, after almost two years of my religious journey, has not gone away. It's stayed a need; it hasn't dimmed down in my mind at all.

I need to pay another visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

I've been there once. I was 13, with my parents, and while I will not forget that visit, things have changed. Even since this past Sunday, things have changed. My perspective is different.

Incredibly different.

For those that have never been to the museum, it's constructed in a way that makes visitors go through exhibits in a certain order. You go from the top of the building down, if memory serves. When you walk in, you're given a little grey booklet with the name and story of someone who lived during the Holocaust. As you finish walking one exhibit or one floor, you are asked to turn the page to find out what happened next to this person, this one life.

The name on my booklet was Lea Ofner-Szmere. She was a young woman, probably younger than I am now, and she was pregnant. She did not survive.

Of the three of us -- my mother, my father, and I -- there were no survivors.

Walking through that museum as a non-Jew is one thing, and powerful enough in and of itself -- my father, famous for his calm, couldn't walk through an exhibit of barracks from Auschwitz, he had to leave the room. There are things I need to look at again, now that I know the whole story about my family.

There's a room in the museum of photographs, all black and white and sepia, and they cover the walls. These are photos of shtetls and their residents. These are photos of people and places that were obliterated by the Holocaust.

I need to know if my great-grandmother's hometown, Chyror, is hanging on that wall. I don't just want to know, I need to know.

As I sat in Temple Beth Ahm Sunday, watching "Inheritance," listening to Helen Rosensweig speak, the need grew. (See story, Page 1.) I went back and forth between being floored by this woman's incredible story and feeling a knot in my stomach, wondering.

At one point in the film, Rosensweig tells Amon Goeth's daughter, Monika, that she had to come to Poland, back to Plaszow, for herself, for closure. "These are my people here," she said, gesturing on the screen to the empty camp.

Every time I speak to a survivor, I want to know what happened to my family, if they had stories like the one I'm hearing, what happened to the place that might have their records, what it looked like.

I don't know that I'd have the stomach to go to Poland, but I'd like to think I'm that strong. One day I really would like to see where my family came from (both sides, though, admittedly, it's quite easy to get to England and find my Matthew roots). I'd like to be able to stand where she stood, and know that the playing field is level now.

I called my mother immediately after the program on Sunday, and I spoke to her the entire way home.

"Mom, do you remember ‘Schindler's List?'"

"Yeah," she said. "Why?"

"I just met someone who was on the list. She worked in the villa, at the camp."

My mom got a little quiet. "Oh, God."

"Pretty much." I waited a second, trying to process what I wanted to say and how to say it. "Every time I meet someone who survived, especially someone from Poland, I wonder what happened to the rest of us."

My mom sighed. "I know. But you kind of know where they are."

There was an intuitive leap here that I was just not getting, and I guess she realized this from my lack of response.

"Lauren, they're with you," she said. "You'll find out the rest. But that's the important part."

Now I'm planning a trip down to D.C. to go back to the museum, and look at it through different eyes. Maybe I'll find the rest.