JOSHUA BRANDT
Bulletin Correspondent
Over 300 people gathered at San Francisco's Congregation Emanu-El last week to commemorate more than 33,000 Jews slaughtered at the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev. The 1941 massacre took only two days, and speaker after speaker told tales of burned bodies, of human remains seeping into the earth and of incalculable loss.
Yet the Reform congregation's cavernous interior, majestic stained-glass windows and ornate bimah provided too well-gilded a framework for taking in the horrors of that event. And in fact no prepared speech, by people who weren't there, could capture the immensity of what happened.
Ultimately, the words that carried the most gravitas were spoken without a text. Fittingly, they were uttered by two people unsure of how to articulate them, still grappling with the Shoah's legacy -- two people who witnessed the horrors up close.
"The things you saw with your own eyes, you almost forget," said Gabriel Piotrkowski, a survivor of both the Lodz Ghetto and Birkenau concentration camp. "But there are images that stay with you," he said after the event. "There was a Gestapo guard who couldn't have been more than 18 years old. And he asked me what we had done wrong to deserve so much suffering.
"I told him that we hadn't done anything wrong. That we were in the camps just for being Jews. He wouldn't believe me. He refused to accept my answer."
Piotrkowski, along with U.S. Army liberator Floyd Dade and others, spoke at the April 19 event to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre. The service in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day was sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Holocaust Center of Northern California, with the assistance of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation's Emigre Leadership Institute.
Dade, a San Francisco resident, was part of the all African-American battalion that liberated the Gunskirchen concentration camp in 1945. He is still in disbelief of what he saw.
"Our mission was to seek and then destroy the enemy, and that was it," said Dade, who lit a candle of remembrance. "We were not prepared for what we saw. There were piles and piles of dead bodies stacked on top of each other. And some of the survivors were so weak, that when we gave them food, they died from internal hemorrhaging.
"Sixty years after the [start of the] war, I still have a real hard time talking about it. And 60 years later, I still say to myself, 'What in the earth happened back then?'"
In addition to those who were eyewitnesses, a number of speakers addressed the legacy of the Holocaust, including two young San Francisco emigres who performed dramatic readings of writings on Babi Yar. Anya Tepermeyster, a U.C. Berkeley student who emigrated from Chernovtsy, read an excerpt from Shlomo Aronson's book "The Last Judgment." Vera Lev, a University of San Francisco student who emigrated from Moscow, read "A Necessary Explanation" by Anatoly Kuznetsov.
John Rothmann, a longtime Jewish community activist and KGO-Radio talk show host, also spoke, as did Yossi Amrani, the consul general of Israel.
"History has entrusted the Jewish people with a great burden," said Amrani. "It is our obligation never to let this atrocity happen again to us...or to others."
The consul general made an impassioned call to remember Israel as a beacon of hope and strength for the Jewish people, saying the country still faces many of the same challenges that it did 53 years ago, when it was formed in the shadows of the Holocaust.
Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan of Emanu-El praised the efforts of 11,000 teenagers from across the globe who participated in the "March of the Living" from Auschwitz to Birkenau. He also congratulated this year's winners of the Morris Weiss Writing Contest, dedicated to the memory of a man who survived 10 concentration camps, and whose protest of a local Nazi bookstore sparked the formation of the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
The persecution of "others" and its lessons pertaining to the Holocaust formed the crux of a contest-winning poem read by Lauren Lim of San Francisco's Lowell High School. Lim wrote about the experience of shunning a homeless person, and then absorbing the lessons of the Shoah:
"Yesterday/ When I was needed/ I turned away/ Yesterday/ Ignorance/Took the place of Understanding."
The Rev. Douglas Huneke of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tiburon provided a fittingly contemplative moment at the end of the service.
Upon his first visit to Auschwitz in 1977, Huneke caught his reflection in a piece of glass.
"As I stood there looking at myself, I wondered what side of the glass I would have stood behind...and I wondered what uniform I would have worn."