Yom Hashoah

Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  There is some controversy in the Jewish Orthodox community if today is an appropriate day to commemorate the Holocaust, and I won't go into the details of that debate here.  But personally, I often find myself wondering how every day is not Holocaust Rememberance Day.  Maybe not on an international level, but certainly among Orthodox Jews, the grandchildren of survivors.

I grew up among Holocaust survivors.  Every member of my shul (synagogue) over the age of 50 was a survivor.  They were as varied in personalities as any other group of people.  There were the quiet ones, the boisterous ones, the friendly ones, and the ones who were always shushing the children.  They never discussed their trauma, but they didn't have to, it was in the lines on their faces, in their smiles that turned into a sad, nostalgic, far away look, in their silence.  You could hear their stories loud on clear on the breath of every word they spoke.  You could see it in the lone tear that accidentally escaped their eyes seemingly out of nowhere.

As a child, I knew to never ask them about their pasts.  I read books from those few at the time who published them, but I never asked my next door neighbor how her family was killed, or the people at shul how they survived.  But it came out in stray comments here and there.  For example, the man at the kiddush who refused to drink coca-cola because it tasted just like the bugs in his mouth he woke up to every morning as a partisan in the forest.  Or the lady who lovingly told me I was lucky I looked like a shiksa (non-jew.)  Or the lady who accidentally called me Sarale all the time, then apologized and said I just look so much like her child that was killed.  A tear runs down my cheek as I try to recall her name, but cannot.

And of course there was my grandfather, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp.  He survived by the strength of his stoic resolve, and he tried to pass that on to us.  So if we were upset about something, he would ask loudly, "Do you have a roof over your head?  Do you have food to eat?  So sheifele, what in the world is there to complain about?"  He thought he would cure me of night terrors one night when he was babysitting and I woke up crying from a nightmare.  He listened to the tale of my scary dream, then told me, that's nothing, wait till you hear what happened to ME when I was your age!  True, this turned out to not be a good cure for nightmares, but now that he is gone, I cherish those nightmares he shared with me along with the happy memories I have of him.  And while I would never share with my young children the details of the horrors of the Holocaust, I am sad that they don't know them.

It wasn't the details or the events themselves that are etched on my soul.  Surely books will always survive, telling the tale of terror that our ancestors lived through.  But the story will never be complete without seeing their faces, without tracing the numbers on their arms, without hearing the flatness of their voices as they suppress the pain inside them.  I am sad for that part of the narrative that we are losing, for the real, human side of the story.  I am sad that my children will need a specific day to remember the Holocaust, that it isn't on their minds every single day, because they never witnessed that pain firsthand, and it isn't a part of them.