The World Needs to Know

Yom Hashoah 

Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day 

Yom Hashoah 2021 is observed at sundown, Wednesday, April 7th and ends at sundown on Thursday, April 8th. Yom Hashoah, also called Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorates the lives of the Jewish people who died in the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945 more than 76 years ago.

Approximately six million Jews and some 5 million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust. More than one million of those who perished were children. 

This day is remembered in the Hebrew calendar on the 27th day of Nisan.

Watch this video from 2017 of a group of young Canadian students

 visiting Auschwitz along with a survivor of the Nazi death camp

The Numbers on Her Arm

Monday, January 27^th, 2020 marked the 75^th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz (a German concentration camp in Nazi occupied Poland). The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is in commemoration of the day, January 27^th 1945, when Allied troops found nearly 8,000 sick and starving prisoners and liberated them.

This liberation happened nearly a decade before my birth and as a young child many of the adults in my family spoke in hushed tones about relatives that weren’t lucky enough to have made it to America, and relatives that died in the concentration camps. I was raised amid whispers of different camp names and the evil “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. Jewish children, safe in America from Nazi Germany’s plans to annihilate our race were sheltered by parents who mourned loved ones and were horrified by what had happened.

My parents had a friend, her name was Anne, and one day I asked Anne about the numbers tattooed on her arm. My mother gasped. Anne took my hand and quietly told me that it was a mark put on her arm by Nazis when she was taken to a concentration camp. And then she somberly old me a “gentle” version of what she had lived through. Knowing how protective my parents always were I innocently asked Anne where her parents were during her ordeal and she told me. And I cried when I learned that she had watched her mother walk into the gas chamber, and she was separated from her siblings all of whom she was sure of their deaths, and her father was shot to death for not working hard enough.

A few years later, in public school, one teacher was brave enough to show our class a film that was taken by a soldier upon liberating one of the camps. There were corpses and tattered clothing, and even remnants of dolls and he told us how many died during this horrendous time; he even told us that more than 6-million Jewish lives had been taken along with thousands of gay men and women, non-Jews who tried to help their Jewish neighbors, Gypsies, twins who were used for experiments, physically and mentally disabled people, Catholic priests, and others who didn’t look Aryan enough. There were parents who were upset about his harsh reality their children witnessed in the film and there were complaints — I think that teacher was fired, we had a different classroom teacher the rest of the year.

Throughout my life I met several more people with numbers tattooed on their arms and poignant stories to tell. And I heard stories of hope as people rebuilt lives. I visited a small local Holocaust museum some years back. And my own daughter visited Auschwitz during a USY (United Synagogue Youth) Pilgrimage to Poland and Israel. And I learned the name of a young relative in my family who died in one of the concentration camps, Sara was just 10-months old.

I was very distressed to read headlines today which implied that growing numbers of millennials have no idea what the Holocaust was. There have always been some deniers, but it happened… the numbers on Anne’s arm were real, the stories I’ve heard from other survivors are real, the film our teacher showed us was real, and 10-month old Sara was real. I fear that #NeverAgain has become a meaningless cry for too many.

We can NEVER FORGET when any people have been tortured, killed, dehumanized, and singled out because of a religion, race, lifestyle or ethnicity. Please teach your children and your children’s children — we must remember so that we can, G-d willing, stop history from repeating itself.

The Railway to Auschwitz

                                                                                                                                  

Children Learn From Their Parents ~ #MondayBlogs

Many… many years ago I got a Summer Stock gig in upstate New York. It was the summer of 1974 and I was excited. It was my first time living away from my parents’ home and on my own.

I met a lot of new people that summer, they came from all over the country and to a kid who grew up in “da Bronx”, NYC, it was interesting to meet so many and hear about all of their experiences. There was no shortage of fun times and parties and we each formed our own circle of pals.

I hung out with the light and sound crew (I was there as a lighting technician), I was the only female in this small group. One of the guys, I’ll call him Howard to protect his identity, came from a small town in Vermont. It was Howard’s first time away from home as well, his first time meeting people who didn’t live in his small town.

The first day we met I was wearing a Star of David pendent and I noticed that he was staring at me whenever he thought I didn’t see. Finally I asked him what was up. He apologized and a few minutes later he sat next to me at the dimmer board and asked me if I really was Jewish. I said yes and asked him why he wanted to know. He pointed to my necklace.

I was not expecting his next words. They were innocent and knocked the breath out of me.

“I never met a Jewish person before. I was always told Jews had horns.” And he quickly apologized. Howard told me that his parents, aunts and uncles all lived in that small town and went to the one church that everyone went to. Everyone was the same where he grew up and they all said that Jews had horns.

I laughed nervously and said, “Well we don’t.”

He asked a lot of innocent questions about my religion, my Spanish surname, growing up in a big city and more. In Judaism it’s a mitzvah (commandment) to teach and so I was happy to answer his questions, questions which came from pure curiosity — he was seeing the world outside of his small home town for the first time.

Howard called his parents that night to ask if they had ever seen a Jew with horns and they admitted that they never did. When he asked why they told him that there were horns they said that’s what they had been told by their parents as they grew up in that same small town. They expressed nervousness when he said he had a Jewish friend but at his insistence they decided to let him decide for himself who he could be friends with.

I did meet them later in the summer and they were actually very nice people. I don’t know what happened to Howard and his family when the summer was over, I went home to plan my wedding and we never really stayed in touch. But I would like to think that just maybe they stopped telling people the stereotype they were raised with. Just maybe they were a little bit more accepting of people who were different than them and maybe there was a little less prejudice in that small Vermont town.

Don’t teach your children prejudice because they like to believe that Mommy and Daddy are always right. Children learn from their parents.