One Last Journey Into the Night: Revisiting, Remembering And Slowly Losing Memory Of The Darkness Of Treblinka
Israel Arbeiter crawls through an opening on the ground floor of an abandoned building and descends into the dank, garbage-strewn cellar below.
The candlesticks. Where are the candlesticks?
He had last stood in this cellar about seven decades ago with his brother, Motek. Hitler had annexed a portion of Poland into his “Greater Germany.” Jews were being targeted for deportation. The boys’ father told them to bury what they wanted to save, silver candlesticks and other religious items that had been in the family for generations. They put them in a bucket and covered them with earth. They would be back someday. They were sure of it.
Now, Arbeiter, who goes by Izzy, peers through the darkness.
The digging has been going on for more than two hours. Izzy’s grandson and a family friend have raked through the basement, using shovels to probe through layers of dirt, sand, broken bricks, till, and wet clay. But the candlesticks are gone. Like so much else. His home, his parents, two of his brothers.
Izzy has traveled more than 4,000 miles from his Newton home to get here. It is not his first trip back to the towns and fields where he and his family encountered a Nazi regime intent on wiping out Jewish life in Europe. But, at 87, he believes it will be his last.
On his eight-day journey from his childhood home to the sites of concentration camps in Poland and Germany, Izzy revisits his darkest moments and recounts his miraculous escapes. His story echoes the terrible odyssey endured by a generation of Holocaust survivors that is slowly dwindling.