The Scars of USHMM Part Two- Grieving

In this second part of a series on the USHMM and my experience I'm going to cover the topic of grief. 

Firstly, grief is actually defined as "A multifaceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, spiritual, and philosophical dimensions." That sounds like the grief we have all known at some point or another in our lives, right? It implies that we knew the person we are grieving for closely.

But what if that's not the case? What if you never knew them?

That's where the USHMM comes in. I have never in my life experienced such a level of grief for people I never met. I was used to grieve for people I had known personally like my Nan who passed last August. Anyway, you walk into the place and know you're about to see something horrible but you don't know when you'll start to feel the grief. You might even doubt you can because you most likely never knew these people.

There's a part of the permanent exhibit called the Tower of Faces. It's a bridge you walk across and on the walls you see hundreds of photos of people smiling, living life. Then you hear what happened to them:

The town where the photos were taken was Eishyshock in Lithuania. German troops arrived in Eišiškės on June 23, 1941, and on September 21, 1941, an SS Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing unit) entered the town, accompanied by Lithuanian auxiliaries. More than four thousand Jews from Eishishok and its neighboring towns and villages were first imprisoned in three synagogues and then taken in groups of 250 to the old Jewish cemetery where SS men ordered them to undress and stand at the edge of open pits. There, Lithuanian auxiliary troops shot them to death. The old cemetery is now a site of remembrance with a memorial stone in three languages. The new cemetery was destroyed in 1953 and turned into the yard of a kindergarten.^[8] Some of the private Jewish buildings survive and are protected as part of the urban heritage. One school is now a library, while another was demolished. There are no Jews living there today.

More than four thousand Jews killed in two days by shooting each one to death individually. 

If that doesn't make you feel something, I don't know what can. But as I looked at all these happy faces of pre-war Jews who had all been killed I could barely tell my mom the story of the Tower I almost broke down. And looking back, I wish I would have. 

Moving on is a necessary part of life, but before you do that you need to grieve what you lost. I am still doing that, even though I am still whole; I didn't lose anything. And yet, I'm shattered.