Capturing the Moment, David-Horodok, July 28, 2010/17th of Av, 5770 was written by Marla Rowe Gorosh. Gorosh was a part of the over 100 descendants of David-Horodok and neighboring villages who traveled there from around the world to unveil and dedicate the new Holocaust memorial.
CAPTURING THE MOMENT
By Marla Rowe Gorosh
Capturing the moment of surprise…I stepped through the small, newly planted cedars and between the deliberately placed boulders that reached my hips. My eyes caught the expanse of pure green outlined by red brick- a grave for seven thousand, lying naked and then shot by drunken Nazi beasts.
Now so silent, so flattened where the surrounding pines do not grow, only stones of remembrance. I thought, how fitting, how sobering for the pit to look like a giant cemetery plot.
Somber, heavy, so tired from the four mile walk through the town of David Horodok, tracing The March forced upon them past the wooden homes with their vegetables and flowers.
Today we wore Israeli flags and banners. We carried water and a pink parasol for the hot sun. My feet hurt, my back dripped but I pressed on because they had no choice.
Faces with questioning curious eyes, blond straight hair, their children’s faces can be seen in the stout older women and hardened, leather-skinned men. Thick ankles, gnarled hands and eyes rarely meeting accompanied by a few nods, no waves, no smiles.
I imagined questions- Who are you? What are you planning? Why come to David Horodok, our out of the way town with your Western clothes, sparkly jewelry and Jewish stars?
Did they fear that we might intend to take back what was stolen? Our families’ homes, furniture, clothing, books and pictures? Silverware, table linen?
Do you understand? Don’t fear for your things. We walk for people –the lives of our mothers, our fathers, sisters, brothers and cousins. We walk for the children who were never conceived, for our distant cousins, today made so close as we walk on their streets and touch their houses and now face their bones.
We don’t know how to feel about you. What do you know? Probably nothing. The genocide is not in your lessons in school. Your grandparents are gone or don’t mention it. Your parents never learned of their parents’ observations or participation in the routing out, rounding up, forced movement into the ghetto or march at gunpoint with dogs at their heels across the bridge and out of town along the road through the cornfields then along the birches and into the clearing in the pines where the pit was dug by the neighboring Horodtchukas-Tatars-Mongol Clans, who volunteered for the jobs of digging the pit, sorting the clothes and then checking the homes for an additional two weeks to find those who tried to hide.
Which ones along our March today knew any of these details? I asked myself, How could they ever know?
And then I saw… the side of the memorial was thick with Villagers dressed as if going to church. Silent, standing by or holding their small children in expectant attention watching us enter the gravesite of the seven thousand and the memorial to the heinous crimes that were committed in the murder of our families. I felt my throat tighten, I cried.
They were there to learn, to hold open the possibility for understanding.