Last weekend, at a Tel Aviv cafe, I met Shani. At 24, she is an intelligence officer with
the IDF. I was introduced to her through
her father, who suggested I speak with her in my quest to understand more about
the Israeli observance of Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day).
Over coffee, she told me the story of why she’s chosen a career in the
army.
“My grandparents,” she began, “were a big
influence on me”. Holocaust survivors
who met after the war, they lived with Shani when she was young. She and her grandfather were extremely close.
He was a brilliant doctor who spoke 8 languages and who had spent the war in a
forced labor camp in Transylvania, after an informant turned him in for
honoring his Hippocratic oath despite the ban on Jews’ practicing medicine. “He couldn’t deny someone help,” she says.
Her grandmother had been taken from Hungary
in the dead of winter and left to freeze or starve to death in the woods of Sibir. A farmer offered to save her if she would
marry him; she was a very beautiful woman.
She agreed, and her family lived; later, she ran away.
Her American maternal grandfather was a
pilot with the Air Force who spent a year in a German prison during the
war. (When he asked for something to
read, the only book they had was Grey’s Anatomy; he read it so thoroughly and
so repeatedly that when he enrolled in medical school after the war, he skipped
his first year.)
These stories didn’t come to life until Shani
was in 7th grade, when she interviewed her grandparents for a Jewish
roots project at school. Four years
later, she and her classmates took a trip to Poland. She showed me a handmade scrapbook from that
trip: it begins with a group of girls striking goofy poses in the airport, and
it ends with photos of the gas chambers, the ovens and the bunks at Auschwitz,
Treblinka, and Majdanek.
In between are photos from a visit to a
beautiful old synagogue in Poland. The
class visited the synagogue, and then they took a short walk down a path into
the woods, where there is a memorial.
The Nazis had come to this synagogue, marched everyone out to the woods,
and executed them en masse. At age 16, Shani
and her classmates reenacted this march.
Five years later, Shani came back to Poland
as a second lieutenant with 50 people in her charge. Having absorbed the initial shock of seeing
the death camps in high school, she was able to move beyond shock when she
returned. Before she left, she recalls,
her commander told her that “When you come home, we’ll meet you at the plane
with two things: a piece of land, so that you can kiss the ground, and a
contract {to sign on for long-term service}.”
She did.
Shani says she is “very happy and
fulfilled” by her position in the army. The
intelligence work she does is interesting (though she can’t talk about
it.) Her boyfriend has it harder; as a
combat soldier, he is stationed in Gaza.
Because of her position, she knows what he is doing; she knows when he
is in danger. When I brought up the
Palestinian question, Shani answered it simply: “In the army, you can’t talk
about your political thoughts… Israel is surrounded by enemies. We have to survive.”
She thinks of her grandparents, of the
things she saw at Auschwitz – and she carries a responsibility to defend the
state of Israel so that these atrocities can never happen again. But she also worries that she isn’t doing
enough. On both of her trips to Poland,
a survivor came with her group. In 20
years, who will come along? She feels
her grandparents’ experience receding from the collective conscience of young Israelis
and resolves to do more to keep it alive.
As an officer, Shani follows a scripted
ritual on Yom Hazikaron: she visits the grave of a soldier from her unit and performs
a military ceremony. She’s uneasy with
the day; she feels as if it “makes it look very good” to die. Still, given the alternative, she agrees: “Of
course it’s very important to honor.” It
is a somber holiday in Israel; no retail establishments have Memorial Day
sales. The day is dedicated to
remembrance.
Yesterday, the cab driver taking me to the
airport pointed at the strings of colorful flags and lights going up around Tel
Aviv. “Too bad you’ll miss the
fireworks,” he said. “Independence Day. Big parties.”
I had noticed the decorations. “What about Yom HaZikaron?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Yes, very sad,” he said. “For
all the people who died. But then, big
parties.” Israel's Independence Day begins the
minute Memorial Day ends. For those reliving the loss of loved ones, it is not an easy transition.
It seems to sum up much of my experience of
Israel: the juxtaposition of extremes.
