Things I will remember - Jodi Garber-Simon

Things I will remember -

Reflections on Majdnek

The walls of the gas chambers are a deep blue -
A beautiful shade of my favorite color.

Zyklon B - the sinister gas -
the chemicals that dropped in from the roof and killed so many -
stained the walls blue.

I thought, while standing on the concrete where so many died,
"Do I need to change my favorite color?"

But I realize that from the horror of that place - from the horror of the camps and the death chambers- the fields that still contain ditches dug by Jews and then used as their graves -

Comes a great beauty.

A beauty in the Shema being said as people perished, a beauty in the stories of those who survived. A beauty in teenagers from Detroit singing Ha'Tikvah while waving Israeli flags on the steps of a mausoleum containing still unburied ashes of our ancestors.

A beauty in a sunny day when I, a Jewish woman, walked into the gas chamber at Majdnek, sang some prayers in that holy space, and then walked out the other side. Alive.