Packing
Visiting Auschwitz, dancing on Fifth Avenue
She is packing so she can visit Auschwitz.
Even expressing this takes my breath away. The phrase “packing for Auschwitz” sits in my throat, lodged there uncomfortably, like a pill stuck with nowhere to go.
There were others who packed for Auschwitz.
This intrusive thought appears again and again in my mind, and I do my best to shove it down, deeper, so I can do the work of being her mother. Of finding the Epipen and making sure she has enough of her laundry done. But doing so only makes me think of the thousands of other mothers who packed their children for Auschwitz, not as part of a high school senior trip to learn about our heritage, but because there was no choice but to pack. And to pack as a Jewish mother only knows how: for contingencies, for what-ifs, for better-to-have-it-than-not situations. To pack for whatever-may-happen. And to have failed, in spite of their best efforts, to anticipate the worst that could happen. Because who could anticipate such a thing?
There is no way to pack for Auschwitz.
My questions — the mundane and the terrible — are packed compactly, the equivalent of emotional packing cubes: Do you have those Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi excerpts I wanted you to read? Did you pack the Benadryl? Do you know what Zyklon B is? Do you have a converter for your phone?
We live in a world where “never again” — the hallmark of my ’90s upbringing — has begun to feel more like a desperate plea than a resolute pledge over which we have any agency. Where visiting Auschwitz and sites of October 7 in Israel is how our children bear witness, in a present day where our children already have witnessed more in the news than we thought we or they could bear. Never again?
On the day she tours the crematoria on her senior year trip with her high school, I will be singing and dancing on Fifth Avenue in the Israel Day Parade, as a proud Zionist and a principal at the school she attends.
Same planet, different universe.
There is beautiful and heartbreaking symmetry in this: she will look deeply into the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust, draped in an Israeli flag, the white ash of the murdered baked into the earth beneath her feet, but she will be able to walk out of that camp. On the same day, draped in an Israeli flag, I will dance and sing down Fifth Avenue, surrounded by people who are proud to be Jewish and proud to support Israel. This is our story: our loss and our hope must live side by side. There is no alternative.
Our daughter will bear witness at these concentration camps I’ve never visited. Like she did at Nova in Israel in February, as she weaved her way in and out of the burnt car graveyard and the beautiful pictures of beautiful young adults, their lives in heartbreaking technicolor.
It is too much for anyone to bear, but she will bear it. As the Jewish mother who wants to equip her child for both real and imagined scenarios, I hope that all the stories she learns — unique in their individual terribleness — become a part of her story now, too; their stories sealed upon her heart. She will bear witness to this suffering, and unlike the others, she will get to leave the camps, intact, whole, and also broken.
This Shabbat, we will do what we do when our children aren’t home for us to cradle their heads in our hands for when we bless them. We do this when they are at sleepaway camp — not that camp. But this Shabbat, my husband and I will face the east, toward Poland. And our younger two children will watch knowingly as we extend our hands outward toward her, in our dining room, as if touching her. We will say the blessing that has been said for thousands of years by millions of parents. We are separated by centuries and tragedies, but we are united by our hope for something better, our desperate cry that “never again” means something to anyone besides us.
We have packed our children, and we hope we have packed them well enough to go out into this world, broken, but whole. I will close my eyes, willing my love for my daughter to travel across the planet to her, so she can feel my blessing.
May God bless you and protect you. From unearned Jew hatred. From the abandonment of people who won’t really see you. From the resignation of our former allies. From the despair you will inevitably feel when you see the world for what it is instead of what we’ve wanted it to be for you. There was nothing I could have packed that could have prepared you, and I’m sorry.
May God shine His face upon you and be gracious to you. May you still feel hope course through your veins, in spite of bearing witness. May the beating of your heart remind you we are still here, you are still here, we are still marching down Fifth Avenue. We are broken and whole. Your fortified heart is still semi-permeable.
May God grant you peace. May you go out into this beautiful and terrifying world wearing your Judaism proudly, and may you still believe this world can be better than you ever imagined.
We have packed you as best as we could.
Ariel Horn Levenson of Livingston is the middle school principal at Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy; her daughter is a senior at Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School.
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