The Nazis finally caught up with my father in 1967. I was only sixteen years old when he succumbed to the heart disease contracted through an untreated infection in the concentration camp. At roughly the same age, in 1944, my father had been thrust into the hell of Auschwitz and seen his parents selected for death at the notorious railhead at Birkenau.
As a teenager, I had heard about and read almost all the stories and articles about my father’s time in the camps and was intimately familiar with his book, The Yellow Star. He turned to writing partly as a therapy for the early nightmares but mainly to make sure that the world and future generations would know what happened. With the loss of my father, I felt that this monster that was the Shoah had lashed out in its death throes to bag an unclaimed victim 22 years after everyone thought it was safe. I decided to switch off the whole subject in my mind, and have spent most of my adult life in a state of denial.
As opposed to the loathsome Holocaust deniers, for me this was just a safety mechanism by which I shunned all the films and documentaries, never visited Yad Vashem and did not see ‘Schindler’s List.’ I even avoided traveling to many European cities because many of their streets still looked the same as they did in those gaunt black-and-white photographs of the roundups.
All that changed when I opened a newspaper last month and read that the Israeli Air Force had sent three of its F-15 fighter jets to participate in the 85th anniversary celebrations of the Polish Air Force. Like me, the Israeli base commander had lost grandparents in Auschwitz, but he also had a burning ambition. For 15 years Brigadier General Amir Eshel dreamed of flying the most lethal of Israel’s jet fighters over Auschwitz as a powerful symbol of remembrance and defiance. The paper reported that, after some hesitation, the Polish authorities gave their permission and a date was selected — September 4, the day the F-15s would make their 1,600-mile return flight to Israel.
The thought of such an event totally captured my imagination and I decided, there and then, that I must be there for this unique spectacle. No one was more surprised than my wife. After 20 years of marriage to a Europhobe, she found me downloading web pages about Auschwitz. I instinctively felt that this was going to be my best chance to reconnect with my father’s memories and establish some emotional and spiritual connection with the grandparents I never knew.
In an effort to retrace his footsteps, I dusted off my father’s book to re-read on the flight. The manner of our arrival in Poland could not have been different. He and his parents in a stifling cattle truck, me in a Boeing 737. I spent the night in a delightful guesthouse in Cracow’s Jewish quarter, he in a railway siding. That evening I fell asleep reading about how, on the first night of Chanukah in the camp, my father had lighted a home-made wick in an old shoe-polish tin filled with engine oil. That simple contraption had done more to lift the spirits of the inmates than anything else up to the day of liberation.
The following morning, as I sped through the heavily wooded countryside, the weather seemed to deteriorate with every mile. My driver doubted whether any flight would be attempted through clouds that still clung to the treetops. He wondered how upset I would be, having made the trip especially for the flypast. Strangely I was not that bothered. I thought about the Dayenu song we sing on seder night: ‘If I had been able to come to this place as a free Jew and not seen the flypast … dayenu … it would be enough for me.
