By David Smigel, Staff Writer
Looking at the panel of grandchildren of survivors at my community’s Yom HaShoah tekes (memorial program) last year, I found myself incredulous at the prospect that this was all we could manage. As they answered questions about their families’ experiences in the Shoah, I was struck by a realization that hardly allowed me to concentrate.
When had it happened? How could the world have so fundamentally changed without me ever noticing it? Seeing the warnings I had been raised on suddenly come to fruition, the idea that someday we would have only memories of those who witnessed the Nazi brutality firsthand, that it would then be us who would bear the weight of carrying on their legacies, I could not shake the question: Where are the survivors?
Only two weeks before, I had departed from Poland after seeing the sites of death camps and massacres, hearing about the crimes committed against our people with the sole intention of the complete and coordinated eradication of the Jewish race. I had always heard these things, but being there painted a grim reality only physical sites can communicate. These feelings were only amplified by the alarming and fresh wounds left by October 7 and the subsequent war which plagues Israel even today, as we are again forced to fight for our right to exist in the face of a genocidal threat.
The tekes carefully balanced the hardships of today with the tragedies of our not so distant past. From the hallway of my shul, exhibiting damaged and destroyed kibbutzim invaded in the October 7 massacres, echoing the antagonization of our people which has pervaded throughout our history, I made my way into the beit knesset for the program. Six yahrzeit candles were lit, each one corresponding to one-million Jews murdered, and a short film was presented, depicting a young Israeli girl learning of her grandmother’s experience at the hands of the Nazis via entries she finds in her grandmother’s diary. The story, we were told after, was derived from entries in a real survivor’s journal. The only difference was that in reality, her family never knew her story. The journal was only found during shiva after she had already passed.
Then came the main event, the panel which conveyed the stories of three survivors, and the identities of those recounting them sent me spiraling. Rather than survivors as I had been so accustomed to seeing, it was their grandchildren who related their stories. It was nothing they said nor did, but the fact that, though older than me, they were equally as generationally removed from the events as I was. None of them had been there.
I, and I’m sure nearly everyone brought up with a typical Jewish education, have been told my whole life that mine would be the last generation to hear firsthand from Holocaust survivors. We were raised knowing that someday they would all be gone and it would be our responsibility to carry on their accounts and experiences, to make what unfolded real for future generations just as the survivors made it real for us. Sitting and watching these descendants personify the transition of responsibility, I couldn’t help but think also of my Polish grandfather’s death only two years prior. I was rocked by the realization that the days we were always told would come were quickly coming to pass.
It didn’t feel natural that something like this could go on without them. How could anyone possibly communicate the abominable cruelty and pain when they themselves had never experienced it? How can someone who wasn’t there possibly even try to convey such a thing? Who are we to be worthy of passing on their legacies?
My entire upbringing, I have had easy and consistent access to people in whom the reality of the Holocaust was permanently inscribed. People who could, without missing a detail, explain every minute happening and miracle that, against all odds, carried them through the end of the world. I simply couldn’t accept that that age was now coming to a close, and it would be my inapt self who would be responsible for carrying on their stories.
I was plagued with thoughts and questions about how I could possibly do justice in transmitting the chronicles of my family and my people to my own children, how my own retelling could possibly hold a candle to those I had heard. And yet, I realized, there is no choice. Whether we like it or not, we must recognize that this responsibility has already shifted to us. We have been trained our whole lives for this duty, and though it is impossible to fully feel prepared, there is nobody else who can fulfill it.
My children will never meet a Holocaust survivor, never fully grasp the loss we suffered from the vile and hateful abuse of the Nazi regime. They will never fully understand that poisonous animosity toward the Jews with which we were marked as subhuman. Just as we could not entirely understand the emotions and pain we were told about, they will have an even harder time comprehending what we pass down from those accounts.
Though my grandfather was not a man of many words, just being in his presence, I gleaned the magnitude of the calamity which he had endured, at least tried to understand its role in my heritage. Though he would never let you call him a survivor, hearing his accounts as a boy fleeing across Europe demonstrated to me how that kind of experience can shape someone. They showed me that a Jew’s existence does not come about without hardship and commitment. Knowing what little he had in his upbringing and his resilience in spite of it, I learned about the things in life that matter the most.
I have had my whole life to immerse myself in my people’s devastation. I spent so much time learning my family’s story and countless others, yet I still feel I wasted my shot. There is so much I’ll never know. Since his passing, I’ve reviewed my grandfather’s Names Not Numbers interview every year on Yom HaShoah to try to better understand his story, but each watch leaves me with more questions I will never have answered.
Time is running out. We must internalize all that we can before the stories are all depleted, before that which we do not uncover is forever lost to time. We have no right to ignore the existential mission to never forget, nor can we allow these things to be belittled nor fade into memory. Already, despite living testimonies, there are those who deny to our faces the horrors of the Holocaust. Again people rise up and try to destroy us and threaten our way of life. If we do not bear our history and ensure its continuity, it will simply cease to be.
In Poland, my group was brought to Chełmno, the first extermination camp to utilize poisonous gas, which shut down not because of its failure, but because of its overwhelming success in eliminating the local Jewish populations. At the forest site where they burned entire cities of martyrs, we gathered shards of bone and human remains which still linger more than 80 years later. Holding the remains of our brothers and sisters who were ruthlessly slaughtered and mutilated on the ideology that Jews were subhuman, we were entrusted with the supreme responsibility of having borne witness to their final resting place. As we buried the scraps of bones and teeth, doing what we could to reclaim their humanity, we understood the inevitable struggle we will undergo in doing their memories justice and opposing those who try to corrupt it.
We face a new challenge of educating the Jewish people without the most key resource to such an education. Without sitting them down in the presence of those who have seen the worst of humanity, we must somehow make their struggles clear. Someday soon it will be us sitting on those panels, and we must do what we can to rise to the occasion.
Their bones remain and their blood cries out. It will not be easy, but we must accept the weight of our responsibility, and never forget.
Photo Caption: A Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel
Photo Credit: Unsplash