by Malka Katz
My rabbi was always talking about how important it is for families to celebrate Pesach together at home, so it was hard to believe when he told us, “Get away for Pesach.” I knew why. For several years, my husband had been on a heavy regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, and we needed a rest. Although feeling guilty for leaving family, I booked a modest hotel in Miami run by dear friends and looked forward to a relaxing week. By the end of Pesach, we had gained more than that.
Walking towards
the gate at the airport, my husband stopped every few minutes to catch his
breath. “Do you want a wheel chair?” I asked. He shook his head no. I wasn’t
sure we would make it, but somehow we boarded the plane and took off. Waiting
for our baggage at the Florida airport, I took one look at my husband trying to
keep his balance and pulled up a wheelchair behind him, gently motioning him to
sit down. With a sigh, he did. When our taxi pulled up at the hotel, I felt
both of us breathe a sigh of relief.
After we
dropped off our bags in an ocean-view room, we joined others in a sunlit dining
porch where lunch was served. Although some of the guests were our age and
younger, many were seniors. Retirees, I thought.
The Seders felt
different than at home. In one large room, a rabbi led the Seder for families
or friends sitting at round tables. Many seniors sat there. Other families
requested private rooms. We chose a third option: to sit with those assigned to
our table in the dining porch. The hotel provided everything we needed: a Seder
plate filled with the traditional symbols, wine, grape juice, potatoes for
dipping into salt water, bright green lettuce for maror, sweet-smelling
charoses, and plenty of matzah with a bag for the afikomen. Our grandchildren
were at home so we missed the excitement of their running around trying to find
the afikomen. But on the second Seder night, we joined the program’s managers
and their young children. That felt more like home.
On the first
morning of Chol Hamoed, we stood on our balcony breathing in the salty air as an
orange sun rose over the turquoise waters. Downstairs, we watched chefs create
personal omelets, which we ate with yogurt and fruit for breakfast. After
dinner, we sat on our balcony watching the waves gently kiss the shore. On
other evenings we enjoyed kosher entertainment in the auditorium.
One evening, my
husband and I were sitting in the audience, tapping to Jewish music from a
lively band on stage. Quietly, from a side exit of the auditorium, two EMTs
entered with a stretcher. Either someone had fallen or was sick. It wasn’t the
first time I noticed this. I hoped that everyone would recover quickly. But
what were we doing here with all these older people, I thought.
In the
afternoons, women with numbers on their arms would sit near me in the lobby and
tell of secretive Pesachs, of walking for hours without food or drink, of lying
in ditches. One woman in a blond sheitel
smiled and asked me my name. I asked hers. Then she told me that she was 16
years old during the Holocaust, and at the end of a grueling work day, she
would shake off lice from her dress before walking into the barracks. These
women had been through so much.
I really didn’t
know about the Holocaust until the early 1970s, when I was a young mother
teaching seventh grade in a Jewish Sunday school. When the director asked me to
pick up a Holocaust movie from the local day school, I didn’t think to preview
it. This was before videos, so the film had to be wound on an eight millimeter
projector. On Sunday morning, I got to school and threaded the projector with a
French documentary called Night in Fog, The film was so graphic that
part of the time I put my head down on the desk. I don’t even remember what I
said to the children afterwards. Today, we don’t show these movies to children,
maybe not even to adults.
For a week, I
hardly ate or slept. Before seeing this documentary, I had no idea of the
horrors of the Holocaust. But it left me with a burning desire to find out what
we as Jews had that was so threatening to these inhuman Nazis. When a U.S.
politician announced, “We shouldn’t tell other countries how to treat their
citizens.” I sent him a 15-word telegram saying he should watch the film Night
in Fog, then say we should only care about citizens of our own country.
Viewing that
movie was so painful, that throughout the years that followed, I stayed away
from other films, lectures and books on the Holocaust. I knew only one
survivor, a neighbor whose mother put him and three older siblings on a
Kindertransport. As the train pulled away, he saw her collapse on the platform.
That was so touching that I bravely attended a lecture he gave on his
experiences. He was a hero to me. Now, at this hotel, I was beginning to realize
that I was among other heroes and heroines.
The most
dramatic moment of our stay happened at Yizkos on the last day of Yom Tov. In
the hotel’s small shul, I stood behind the mechitza
and said Yizkor for my beloved parents,
a”h. Suddenly, I heard the baal
tefilla shout, “And for those from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungry...who died at Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Dachau,
Buchenwald....” On and on, he shouted out names of countries and concentration
camps where so many perished. Tears fell on my cheeks. I started to sob. Other
women were sobbing with me. I moved closer to the mechitza and glanced through the crack. There, sitting among the
survivors was my husband, a different kind of survivor, crying along with the
men. These elderly Jewish men and women had lost so many. Yet here they were at
a hotel celebrating Pesach, a time when Hashem brought us out of Mitzrayim,
crowned us with His Torah, and made us His nation. I realized what an honor it
was to recite Yizkor with them.
Back home,
walking through the airport, I could hardly keep up with my husband. He
actually walked ahead of me. The rabbi was right; we needed to get away for
Pesach. It strengthened us. More than that, it bound us to survivors of the
Holocaust as we cried with them in a Pesach Yizkor that I will always remember.
