Visiting the Jewish Dead Abroad
The upcoming Memorial Day holiday reminds me of paying my respects in Thailand and Fiji.
March 1, 1989
Today I paid tribute to the men who built the bridge over the River Kwai. Being in that exact spot was far more moving than I expected even though the original bridge has been replaced. In some strange way, I was paying tribute to my father who could have been sent there in World War II instead of the European front. The people of Thailand maintain a cemetery there for the foreign soldiers who died protecting them. I walked among the sea of gravestones, and found a Jewish star among the crosses.
It took a long time to get there, but I was glad to be out out of ugly, congested Bangkok. It was hard to put together the prettiness of the River Kwai area and the sickness, disease, and sheer agony of the men once so cruelly imprisoned there.
June 12, 1995
Today this wandering Jew decided to pay respects to other wandering Jews. I went out to the cemetery I had read about in my guidebook and asked a uniformed man if he knew where the Jewish part of the cemetery was. Fijians adopted Christianity 180 years ago, and the cemetery was divided by religion.
The Jewish area was small but fenced in, keeping the Jews apart in death as they most likely were while living in Fiji. I was curious about them and their lives in Fiji. The most recent stone was for Zelda, buried in 1990. I took some photos, and then did what I tried not to do. I slipped in the mud, staining my skirt and mucking up my sandals. Luckily there was a faucet nearby where I washed my sandals and skirt as best I could.
A man was looking on from afar. There were actually quite a lot of men working in the cemetery. When I got to the path where the man was standing, he asked those inevitable questions, “Where do you come from? Are you alone?” He was holding a machete in his hand and asked me if I knew that all the men working in the cemetery were convicts. The uniformed man was their guard. He didn’t say this in a particularly threatening way, nor did I act afraid. He smiled a big, white-toothed Fijian smile. Further on, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Tags: Bridge on the River Kwai; cemetery in Fiji; cemetery in, Travel
