The Environment & Jewish Deportation: The Day of the Tree

Today's the Day of the Tree. I knew that. But what I didn't know was that is was a non-working holiday. I found that out this morning as my taxi pulled into the EMPTY post office parking lot. Usually the parking lot resembles a well-packed sardine can. That's when the driver informed me it was a non-working holiday. For trees? Really?

As it turns out, the government declared this day a non-working holiday to encourage maximum turn-out for a massive tree-planting campaign--2 MILLION trees, to be exact. Many acres were destroyed in last summers fires and so this day is about the environment under the motto: "Plant a Tree - Plant Your Future".

Today's also a day of commemoration.

7200 trees will be planted in memory of the 7200 Jews from Bitola, Skopje, Stip and other places who were loaded up on cattle cars by the WWII Bulgarian fascist regime 65 years ago and shipped off to the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. The midnight raids happened between the 10th and 11th of March 1943. It's said that only about 2% of them survived either by hiding or resistance fighting. Several activities have been planned here between the 10th and 14th to commemorate this, including the tree-planting.

Coming from a place where the oldest things seem to be Sutter's Fort and the Pony Express, I sometimes forget just how much hard history has been lived here in this area of the world. Jewish deportation being one of them. Honestly, I didn't realize that that had happened here, and knowing it did brings back vivid memories of the Holocaust museum in DC: walking through cattle train cars, the shoes, the bunks, the horror... by the time I made it to the Auschwitz floor I couldn't take it anymore and hastened out of the museum, wiping away tears as I went. So overwhelmed was I by the sheer evil of which man is capable. In 1943 7200 Jews were sent from here to just such a camp... and now, 65 years on, the Macedonians are doing something positive to commemorate those lives.

So today is the Day of the Tree, an effort to bring healing to the land, scarred by fires, and to the Balkan people, scarred by the past. Frankly, I like the promise of healing, hope and new life that planting a tree brings, and pray for the people that they might know true hope and new life in the One who can heal them completely.