VISITING BERLIN ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2025
Carol Chaya Barash, PhD
Building community through storytelling. Healing trauma, dissolving conflict, creating spaces where all people are safe, liberated, and free. Author ?? Speaker ?? Teacher ?? Coach
On our second day in Berlin, I said to Jed, “Berlin is a great city – not too big, not too tall, lots of parks for wandering, all sorts of art museums, live music, clean public transportation, men holding hands, recycling … so European … “?
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I drifted off mid-sentence, recalling this bristling feeling of both at-home-ness and not-at-home-ness just under my skin from my overnight stay in Brussels on my way to Israel the summer after my first year in college. That was 1977.?
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Later, when we stopped at Edeka, the upscale German grocery store, to get some groceries, my encompassing sense of the greatness of Europe returned, staring at a rack of spices from around the world and turning around to find all sorts of grains and pulses and more fresh than frozen vegetables. Wherever the food came from, the packaging with multiple languages cheered me. I dug deep into my memory to ask questions and pay in German. I felt deeply happy and content.??
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There was a moment in 2006, during my last trip to Israel, that I thought of Tel Aviv lovingly as “a European capital … the last outpost of Europe.” I didn’t say these words out loud; I remembered writing about that feeling in my journal and went back to find my exact words, as I read about the recent election of the Christian Democrats in Germany – and the strong second place finish of the hard-right, Nazi-leaning AfD.?
I felt in my bones the slow shift of Europe to the right and the hard, authoritarian shift in the US beyond what I could have imagined even a few years ago.
In just a week, everything I thought I knew about Germany and Europe has been challenged by the thugs in charge in Washington. After our mob-boss President and his boy JDV dressed down Ukrainian President Zelensky, the champion of European democracy, in the Oval Office, England and Germany are standing up to protect Ukraine and the ideals held together by NATO and the European Union since the end of World War 2.?
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Berlin is a city that remembers that long history, including the parts that are gritty. You can’t walk far without tripping over the stolpersteine – brass markers in the sidewalk stones that remember Jewish people killed by the Nazi death machine. Each one of the markers is very specific: from here three people were taken. And from here another two. Family names, given names, where and how they died. There are gaps; not everyone who is lost leaves traces that can be remembered.?
This history of loss and complicity is not a vague far away thing, but something still there, right below your feet anywhere you might walk today in Berlin. We remember and grieve to connect with our own loss, and to acknowledge all that rests beyond the limits of a person’s – or even a people’s – grief.?
There is a room in the Jewish Museum where you see the Nazi atrocities unfold year by year: at first a few bizarre laws excluding Jews from one job or another in remote, little-known towns; then larger towns and cities require Jews to have special papers and pay additional taxes; step by step, Jews are prevented from full participation in civic life. All of this sets the foundation and creates a mindset that makes possible national policies that drive displacement and extermination, hastily constructed and grossly enforced by the military and police.?
To build this machine-like capacity for extermination, Hitler said he used the Jim Crow south in the U.S. as his model and inspiration for the systematic and routine killing of people the state deemed undesirable.
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When Jed and I visited the Bundestag – the German Parliament – the next day, we were reminded that it took Hitler only 52 days after he was elected to replace the vibrant, culturally diverse democracy of the Weimar Republic with a dictatorship that othered, starved, and killed millions of people to extend the power of the most privileged of their own kind. The Nazis killed not only Jews, but gay people, neurodiverse people, Roma, and a wide range of left-leaning journalists, academics, activists and organizers in the name of making Germany free for white, Northern Europeans.?
In the United States, right now, we are living out that room in the Jewish Museum where a few “it couldn’t happen here” things happen more frequently and openly all the time:?
By the time this is published, there will be more atrocities from the MAGA regime, who are hell bent on destroying the entire democratic system. How much they are able to get away with is inversely proportional to how much we are able to resist.?
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On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, over 200,000 German citizens protested against Elon Musk’s appeal to the authoritarian right.?
The next day we booked a guide to walk us through Cold War history and the Wall that separated East and West Berlin. Our guide’s Jewish mother was born in Bergen-Belsen two years after the war, when the camp was still being used to house displaced Jews until they could get visas out of Europe. I imagine the ongoing, daily trauma of those Jews who had just barely survived the death camps having to stay in that same camp for two more years. My stomach clenches, and I feel shooting pains up and down my neck and into my brain.
In that moment, I saw all the ways I was right in thinking of Israel as part of Europe, and, at the same time, how that view – at a much deeper level – is fundamentally flawed. That liberal view of Europe is struggling to hold amidst the crush of Trump-Musk-Vance and the more-is-better tech oligarchy determined to shred the constitution and destroy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of people around the world to expand their own wealth and power.?
If Palestine is the fulcrum of liberation – all people yearn to be free; either we’re all free or none of us is free – then Israel is, indeed, the last outpost of a capitalist-colonial-patriarchal system of violent domination that began with European leaders dividing up the rest of the world and subjugating its peoples and cultures over the past 500 years.?
The liberal mindset holds that system together like glue. Both the United States and Israel were born out of that system, which must be fundamentally overhauled if the earth and our shared humanity are to survive.?
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When I visited Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp outside Berlin, our guide described studies in Germany showing that the descendants of both the victims and perpetrators of Nazi war crimes have increased risk of anxiety and depression, three and four generations later. Those studies guided Germany to develop innovative public school programs teaching not just tolerance, but the strengths and possibilities of diversity and multi-culturalism.?
So it felt to me like a punch in the gut when, six months into Israel’s decimation of Gaza, the German government wrote Israel’s definition of “anti-Semitism” into law, making any criticism of Israel illegal and thus implicitly condoning Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.?
We need to distinguish between words or actions that explicitly endanger Jewish people and those that criticize the Israeli government. Justifying Israel in all manner of crimes against other humans seems to move in the opposite direction from the ideal of a united, democratic Europe where multiple peoples and beliefs are free to speak, to belong, and to create their own destiny so long as they do not intentionally harm or endanger others.?
The idea that Israeli military excess in the present is justified because historically Jews have been the targets of violence and potential annihilation shuts down all criticism of Israel and collapses the range of Jewish belief and practice onto a quite narrowly fundamentalist and nationalist view of Judaism – as if to suggest that God has chosen the Jewish nation to rule over other people. It is the zionist collapsing of “anti-semitism” onto criticism of Israel, as if the Nazi genocide justifies whatever the Israeli military does to survive as a Jewish state, that makes this thinking so dangerous.?
This is a powerful strand of Jewish belief, but it is definitely not the only – or most common – one. In Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: a Reckoning, Peter Beinart shows how this view of Israeli military triumph shows up again and again in classic Jewish texts. There is another strand of Jewish belief and culture stating that all people are worthy of care – that each person is the entire world and it is our duty, as a people who have been outsiders, to repair the world by tending to each individual as if we are kin.
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When I began studying Judaism with my father — he was 48 and dying, and I was 16 — we were both attracted to the tradition that all, Jewish people, alive and dead, descend from the prophetic moment when God spoke directly to Moses at Mt. Sinai, and we responded, “yes, here we are, the descendants of refugees, destined to help other people be safe and free.”??
My father is here, encouraging us as we build a network of humanity-loving activists of all faiths who communicate from our deepest levels of love and trust – like the roots of different trees protecting one another underground – through this passage of our shared liberation.??
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