Yad Vashem,
Rev. Lloyd Howell

      In April of this year I went on a Pilgrimage for Peace to the Holy Land sponsored by the American Clergy Leadership Conference which included ministers and lay persons of various faiths including some Muslims. Yad Vashem was among the places our delegation visited. There are really no words that can capture the essence of a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum located in Jerusalem. Nonetheless I will attempt to relate just a few thoughts.

    I, of course, had heard of the Nazi death camps and the accounts of survivors. I’d seen photos and film footage of the atrocities. I grew up in New York City with Jewish friends and was exposed to their faith and concerns. Later, during a short period, wherein I worked as a newspaper reporter in New York City, I became more familiar with Jewish issues and had met Elie Weisel, noted Jewish spokesman and 1986 Nobel Peace prize winner, and had interviewed hunters of the infamous Nazi SS doctor Josef Mengele and so forth. BUT to go to Yad Vashem is to make oneself vulnerable to a powerful experience of the tragedy and unfathomable grief of that moment in history. The pain that is interwoven in the Holocaust is made manifest in such a visit. Yad Vashem evoked in me feelings that were simply too overwhelming to easily digest.

    Our delegation began our visit by entering the Children’s Memorial Hall. Now, as I write the word “children’s”, cold shivers run through my body and heaves of sobs start to rise to the surface as I mentally re-enter the hall. It has been a month and a half since my visit and now the tears I suppressed at that time catch up with me.

    I am transported back: I am again walking through the memorial’s darkened chambers. I can barely see. There are small lights floating off in what was designed to create the effect of some distant and unreachable place. Everyone is immersed in silence. These must be the souls of the departed little ones, so many left to wander as orphans in the vast darkness of the spiritual world. Calling out to parents, not being able to find their way, wondering what happened and why. I can hear them but there are too many. I could go crazy listening to their cries.  I must tune them out. The blackness of the memorial’s hall forces me to feel I am groping my way through an unknown uncertain world – the world in to which these innocent ones were thrust. It puts me in a mindset where I am able to grasp something of the anguish and loss of separation.

    A dispassionate recorded voice speaks out the name of one of the children every few seconds. The statistics of the Holocaust, in a sense, become meaningless and the reality of the lives and the eternalness of their souls becomes apparent. I stop to wonder. Who can comprehend the loss of more than a million children’s lives? What loss did humanity suffer: of what genius’ were we deprived? How many doctors, scientists never came to be? A future Einstein? Someone who could’ve cured cancer? We will never know!

    For some reason the words “F--king Nazis” comes to my mind but even anger has no place here for it is quickly drowned in a sea of sacred holy grief: the hurt of the parents who cried out for their little ones; the hurt of the little ones torn away from nurturing parental love before they even knew what life was about and the hurt of G-d who had to witness it all.  I wonder how I can reach out and embrace even one of these lost children. There seems to be no way; they seem so far away. I pledge to look for them and their parents when I enter the spiritual world after life. They must be told of the True Parents.

    Meanwhile the pain is too great, I am so overwhelmed as to become numb – my tears will have to wait for another day.

* Rev. Howell lives on Long Island and is a local minister with the Family Federation for World Peace. He participated in a 2006 Peace Pilgrimage to the Holy Land.