Memory, identity, and the shadows of a lost world.

The film A Real Pain captured the haunting legacy of European Jewry with piercing clarity. Inspired by that film and grounded in personal experience, this reflection follows a journey across Europe—a pilgrimage through the remnants of Jewish life, memory, and survival.

Echoes of a Lost World: The Destruction of European Jewry

I arrived in Europe carrying the weight of absence. Before World War II, vibrant Jewish communities thrived in almost every city and village of Central and Eastern Europe. That world is gone—two out of every three European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust (Bauer, 2001). Walking through former Jewish quarters in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, I felt the silence left behind. Street corners where synagogues once stood are now marked by plaques or empty lots. It struck me that an entire civilization had been erased, its only remnants residing in archives, memories, and the faint outlines of mezuzahs on doorpostsoints out traces of a synagogue, a yeshiva, and a Jewish-owned store in Lublin—ghostly reminders of a community that was erased, yet whose presence somehow persists (Silverstein, 2024). Watching that, I recalled standing in a Polish town square myself, imagining the lives that once animated it. The destruction of European Jewry is not just a statistic; it is felt in the stark contrast between old photos of bustling shtetls and the quiet, nondescript streets I found. My journey became a dialogue with that absence—each site whispering what once was.

Confronting the Camps and Ghettos: Bearing Witness to Horror and Resistance

Standing beneath the iron sign that declares “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” at the Auschwitz gate, I felt a chill crawl up my spine. No movie or book fully prepares you for the oppressive quiet of a concentration camp. The air itself felt heavy with sorrow. Inside the barracks-turned-museum, I walked past piles of tattered shoes and human hair, each item an artifact of a life extinguished. At Majdanek, I peered into a gas chamber where blue stains from Zyklon-B gas still blotch the walls—an obscene patina of murder that refuses to fade (Levi, 1988). My stomach turned, and my heart pounded as I tried to comprehend the scale of evil these places represent. Yet I knew I had to be there, to bear witness in person, to stand where my relatives and millions of others had stood powerless before unfathomable cruelty.

In Warsaw, I visited the site of the Jewish ghetto, where a stark stone monument now honors the heroes of the 1943 uprising. The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes stands in a quiet plaza surrounded by postwar apartment blocks, an anachronism that speaks volumes. I placed a bouquet at its base and ran my fingers over the bronze figures frozen in defiance. I remembered how, in A Real Pain, the tour guide brought his group here and declared their journey “a tour about pain,” vowing to “dispel the myth that [Jews] were led like lambs to the slaughter” (Silverstein, 2024). Standing there myself, I thought about that promise. This ground saw unimaginable suffering, but also courage and resistance. I closed my eyes and could almost hear the echoes of the ghetto fighters’ last stand. In that spot, pain and pride coexisted. My pilgrimage forced me to confront both the horror of the camps and the resilience kindled even in the darkest of ghettos.

In Budapest, my wife and I walked through the old Jewish ghetto, where faded Stars of David still adorn decrepit buildings. The Dohany Street Synagogue, a magnificent structure that once stood at the heart of Jewish life, now doubles as a museum to the past. But even in Budapest, where thousands of Jews still live, I felt the weight of history pressing down. The air was thick with the presence of those who perished and the resilience of those who remain. The Shoes on the Danube memorial, a chilling tribute to Hungarian Jews executed by the Arrow Cross, was particularly harrowing. We stood in silence, watching the sun set over the river, the metal shoes frozen in time, a reminder that the trauma of Jewish history is never far from the surface.

Jews as a Race: More Than Religion, A Lineage of Survival

Traveling as a Jew in the very places where Jews were persecuted made me reflect deeply on what my identity means. I am Jewish, but what does that encompass—religion, ethnicity, culture? The Holocaust perpetrators didn’t care if one went to synagogue or kept kosher. Under Nazi racial laws, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was deemed Jewish, regardless of personal belief or conversion (Dawidowicz, 1975). My great-uncle, an atheist who hadn’t set foot in a synagogue in years, was murdered at Treblinka simply for his lineage. This knowledge sat heavily with me as I walked through Europe. I realized my Jewishness, to the world, is as much blood and history as it is faith and practice.

Judaism is a race as much as it is a religion. We carry shared genetics, shared history, and a shared language of survival. Some might argue that Jews are simply a religious group, but history and experience say otherwise. My last name alone tells a story, as does the curl of my hair and the structure of my face. There were places in Europe where I passed unnoticed, but there were also moments when people knew exactly who I was before I spoke a word. I could never fully blend in, nor would I want to. The weight of my ancestors’ survival is not a burden—it is a responsibility.

A Legacy Left Unfinished: Publishing My Great-Grandmother’s Manuscript

My great-grandmother Rose, whose middle name lives on in my daughter’s Hebrew name, left behind a manuscript chronicling her journey from pogrom-ridden Eastern Europe to America. She wrote about leaving Lithuania, crossing the ocean, and trying to build a new life in the Midwest before finally settling in Philadelphia. Her words were never published, and for over 120 years, her story has waited in the shadows. But I have made it my mission to finally bring her book to life.

Reading her letters, I hear her voice speaking across generations, reminding me that survival is only part of our story. We are also storytellers, memory keepers, and preservers of history. If I do nothing else, I will finish what she started. The Jewish race has always relied on storytelling—our history is not only in books but in oral traditions, family legacies, and the writings left behind by those who came before us. The destruction of European Jewry was an attempt to erase our people, but as long as we remember, as long as we tell our stories, they can never truly succeed.