Yom HaShoa Time Capsule in a Milkcan

Six of us raised our hands when the rabbi asked who had parents, siblings, grandparents, or great grandparents who died in the Holocaust. He invited us to come forward and we each lit a candle in remembrance.


My father got his visa to the US in 1934 through his aunt and uncle in Chicago. His parents were never able to get visas out of Germany.


I only know my grandparents through pictures like these, (the one of my grandfather Georg and the other of my grandmother Martha), through stories my father told me, and through the letters they sent him until 1942. My mother only got her visa in 1939 and just barely got out of Germany before the war, also leaving her parents behind.



After the candles were lit and some poems read, pictures from a show produced by the Holocaust Museum were projected onto the wall. Fortunately, I hand't read anything about this and had no idea what was going to happen. I wasn't even sure if this was a movie or a powerpoint or what. There was music and then images of the Warsaw ghetto. Then there was the accented voice of man coming from a speaker from the other side of the room. He was clearly speaking to us from the pictures, but from a different speaker. I'm not sure what those first lines were. Something about needing to write, to document what has happening. His amplified voice was louder than the speaker on the projector. And as I'm processing all this, out walks a man in a black suit and grey hair and the voice and the man become merge.

He introduced himself as Emanual Ringelblum. We were back in the early 1940s in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was telling us what had been happening in the last few years and about his project to get all the Ghetto dwellers to document what was happening in writing. I was totally transfixed and I'd really have to see it again to figure out exactly how he did this, what he said, whether he addressed us as Ghetto residents or outsiders. I know he wandered amongst us and gave some people sheets of paper which they read aloud, the words of Warsaw Jews written at the time and saved in metal boxes and milkcans so that the Nazis' deeds would be known. I think he said there were 10 boxes and six milkcans. After the war two survivors, only one who knew where the writings had been buried, helped to dig them up, though a few are still missing. I have no idea how long he talked to us. He left the room and the powerpoint voice, I think, said that he and his family had been found in the Polish home where he was being hidden and killed.

Then Emanual returned as Marc Spiegel and answered questions about this production of Time Capsule in a Milkcan that he performed for two years at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Emanual/Marc urged us all to to write and document what is happening around us. Good encouragement for a blogger, encouragement I interpreted as increasing the more serious content here. Marc is in Anchorage as Albert Einstein Alive which he is performing around the state and for kids in the Anchorage School District. His lucky son Ben got to come along on this trip.

Another fascinating Jewish WWII chronicler is Victor Klemperer [you may have to log in to the NYTimes online to read this review, but do it, it's free and worth every penny] whose two volune I Will Bear Witness Italics chronicles his daily life in and around Dresden during WWII. He talks about the mundane - planting his garden, getting his car repaired - and he talks about how the Nazis are manipulating language to effectively get the German people to support the Nazi Party, a particularly appropriate topic for those living under the Bush regime. It is a fascinating account of day-to-day life of a Jewish professor in Nazi Germany. He had converted to Christianity and was married to an 'Aryan' and had been on the front lines for Germany in WWI, all of which helped delay his being taken to the concentration camps. The first volume covers 1933-1941. The second volume covers 1942-1945.