The Swiss Man by the Holocaust Museum

    Summer 1995. I was blessed to be walking and talking in the Holy Land. A group of us spent two months there, around sixty days learning and sharing. It was part of my college's study abroad that they had been conducting informally and formally for many years.

    Based in Jerusalem, city of sights and memories, lessons and histories, symbolism and struggles. A small group of us went to Yad Vashem. I think it was me and Sarah Williams, a friend from my Provo Ward, and a young lady from Stanford. And maybe one other? Darby Davis? Not sure, I cannot remember all the details.

    We took the bus to the side of town with this august, somber, important memorial, dedicated to the more than six million Jewish victims massacred in the 1940s in Europe. Sarah, who had been my friend in Provo, had served her church mission in German-speaking Switzerland. Having served my mission in Chile, and more or less falling in love with the language and the culture of that South American country, I thought that Sarah would have such a happy reaction to meeting someone from Switzerland, as I would someone from Chile.

    At the bus stop across from Yad Vashem we met and spoke to a stranger, who was Swiss! He was an older man. I thought that once that we had established that he was from central Europe, where Sarah had lived and learned his native language, there would be some kind of warm conversation from them. But the man was reticent, or silent, and kept his peace a few feet away from us. Maybe he averted our eyes. I asked Sarah: why not talk more to him? She indicated discretely that the man did not want to engage in further dialog, and perhaps he was affected by the place where we were. Yad Vashem.

    I understood. I have tried to understand that moment for a long time. Ever since. How do we deal with such things? How do we survive such loss?

    There were large forest fires in Israel north of Jerusalem that summer, and the ashes of the burnt trees were drifting across the Holy Land that day, as we observed and paid our reverence and respects at the Jewish Holocaust Museum.

    Ashes came falling down on us standing by the bus stop, next to this silent old man from Switzerland. We kept quiet; we let him be to himself. Maybe he visited the museum frequently, as I know some visit beloved gravestones. Maybe this was his first time to frequent this solemn place. 

    I am not sure what memories and visions he was seeing, perhaps recalling and rehashing. He may have been thinking of people long gone, perhaps taken too soon, and in brutal, dark ways. Family, friends, neighborhoods, nations. But, I think that flaking ashes in the air probably said enough about all of that.

    The burnt holocausts of thousands of years of worship of a people based here, next to the Mediterranean Sea, became the name of an awful time in the lives and ultimate destinies of millions of victims and survivors in the mid 20th century. We know it as the Holocaust. In a way mocking the ancient rite.

    The silent ashes of the Holy Land spoke loudly to me and us that summer day.