Not Just One Day......

Yom HaShoah, for me, a daughter of two Shoah survivors, is always.

Growing up in the shadow of this horrific chapter in our history, reliving the memories of its atrocities and never forgetting it are a part of who I am and what I am.

I am the young child in the Ghetto who is pushed to become a thief and steal a potato so that he can feed his starving younger sister.

I am the mother who is desperately trying to calm and silence her baby for fear of having their hiding place disclosed.

I am the teacher in the Ghetto who does all she can to educate the young children and make them understand that which no human mind can grasp, that which is inconceivable.

I am the Rabbi who tirelessly tries to explain to his desperate listeners that G-d is not ignoring them but merely temporarily hiding His face.

I am the partisan who lives in the forest, defiantly resisting and determined to overcome death.

I am the Kapo who was forced to make a difficult choice of either electing death or becoming a false god who would decree who by fire and who by water.

I am the doomed who was selected to be the one who removes the corpses from the gas chambers as I study the familiar faces painted with agony. I see their blank look and frozen eyes staring at me, begging me to live and tell and to Never Forget.

I am the daughter of an elderly sick mother who is desperately trying to ignite the spark of Hope in her dying soul.

I am the young woman who was part of the string quartet that was standing at the entrance to the crematoria, playing the scratched violin as we were dancing our brothers and sisters to the “End of Love.” *

I am a Jewish Yisraeli soldier who visited the Nazi death camps and promised all the innocent victims that their spilled blood will forever light my Life’s path and the path of our future Jewish generations.

I am all of them and many nameless more. I am them, not only one day a year, not only every single day of the year but every single day of my life as well.

* ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ … came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt.” -  Leonard Cohen

Yom Ha'Shoa commemorating Heroism, not only victimhood

                                                                                 

“Heroism is endurance for one moment more” – George F. Kennan

Growing up in Israel, in the early days of the nascent state, was heavily overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust, more so than it is nowadays. Then, unlike now, those who had lived through it, the Shoa survivors were everywhere.  They lived next door, on the same street or in the same town. Some bore the tattooed numbers on their arms; others had the hollow look and blank expression as if riddled by the reality of their survival.

To some Israelis, many were the lambs that went to the slaughterhouse. To me, they were the victims, the children, the babies and the elderly, those that were helpless and defenseless against the Nazi death machine. They had no choice and we remember each and every one of them always.

Those who did have a choice, however, those that lasted, came out of the abyss, resumed their lives and moved on, were the heroes of my childhood. I listened to their stories of endurance, survival and resistance; I gulped their tales of defeating death and overcoming the impossible. What else can such humans be but heroes?

Here is one such story of heroism and survival.

“On the 10th of May 1942, we found ourselves in The Valley of the Shadow of Death, in the midst of a terrible slaughter, in Volozyn, a slaughter whose survivors could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The loud knocks on the door, which woke me up from a nightmare, were also the explanation for my dream, as well as an omen of the end of the Ghetto in Volozyn. In fact, already a day earlier we had seen that the Lithuanian militia had encircled the Ghetto. They had also been joined by militants from Latvia. We, however, did not understand the meaning of such activities.

At four a.m., the drunken murderers burst into the Ghetto like a storm, firing in all directions and kicking the Jews out of their houses. They then gathered them into a large building and from there took them in groups to the cemetery, where they shot them. On the streets that led to the cemetery, there already lay the dead bodies of hundreds of men, women and children who, through illness or weakness, had not been able to walk, and so had been killed on the way to the killing fields.

In one of the yards of one of the houses, Jewish families had built a hiding place underneath a pile of firewood.

On the night in question, I slept in that house. When the drunken murderers attacked the inhabitants of the Ghetto that early morning, I ran with a few others to that hiding place. We climbed a ladder to the top of the pile and lowered ourselves into it. We then pulled the ladder inside hoping to hide our place. However, our footprints were visible on the grass, which was wet from the morning dew. These led the hooligans to us. They ordered us to come out. One of them even came down into the hiding place and kicked me out along with two others who did not come out straight away.

When I reached the top of the pile, I suddenly jumped onto a nearby roof and then to the ground, and started to run wildly. The hooligans shot at me and hit me in the shoulder. With the last remnants of my strength, I reached a little hut in one of the yards. The hut served as an outhouse. Without much deliberation, I jumped into the hole and sank up to my shoulders in excrement. The murderers would have never thought to look for me there.

In that state, as I was sitting in this hole full of stinking dirt and suffering from my injured shoulder which still had a bullet in it, I was destined to witness, through the cracks of the door of the hut, one of the most devastating scenes in our history.

Next to the large building in which they housed the Jews, there sat a German. His rank was “Gebis Komisar” (district director). He conducted, in the most organized fashion and with much “expertise”, the selection of the groups to be sent to their deaths in trenches which had already been dug in the cemetery.

From amongst the condemned, the Germans selected a few tradesmen to be spared. They were allowed to take their wives. One of the selected was a bachelor. Two women jumped at him, each claiming to be his wife. One had a baby in her arms. The man was allowed to take the woman without the baby. The Germans then snatched the baby from the arms of his mother, threw him in the air and shot him. He fell lifeless to the ground.

The atrocities which I was forced to witness continued through the morning and afternoon. The hooligans then went on their way. One could still hear shots in the Ghetto. Later, I found out that White Russian policemen had searched the Ghetto, shot the people they caught in hiding places, and looted Jewish homes.

At nightfall, I carefully came out of the outhouse hole. I went to the nearest house and climbed into the attic. Injured, dirty, and hungry like a dog, I lay there until Monday morning when I came out of my hiding place to try and find out what was happening. The noise of the crowds and the local policemen who came to loot the empty houses, however, immediately forced me back to my hiding place.

At nightfall, I regained my courage and went into the houses in order to look for clean clothes, and hopefully find a means to tend my wound, which was beginning to bother me. When I crawled out, I heard two shots and then someone shouting in Russian: “Again we shot two Jews” I ran back to my hiding place.

On Tuesday morning I heard someone climbing the ladder leading to the attic. From behind the open door that concealed me, I heard one hooligan telling his friend (who was waiting downstairs) “There is no-one here”. These were local residents who were happy Nazi collaborators.

In the evening, I went down and entered one of the houses. I found a piece of bread and a few cooked potatoes. I also saw there a discarded Sefer Torah in which the looters, it seemed, had no interest. An atmosphere of great sadness and abandonment cloaked me. It added to my loneliness and my heart’s despair.

The following day, I lost all of my strength, and I lay there half alive. The pain in my shoulder was very strong.

On Thursday, at twilight, I tried to come out of my hiding place, but could not move a limb. I managed to crawl to the attic window. In the street below, I saw a woman I knew. I wanted to call her, but I was too weak and too excited to be able to utter a sound. Later, I saw another acquaintance, a man I knew very well. Again, I was too weak to signal that I was alive.

Suddenly, I fell down and fainted.

I woke up to the sound of Yiddish conversation and strong hammering on the door below. Through the attic window, I could see men nailing up the door leading to the house in which I hid. I began to shout: “There is a Jew in here! Open the door!”

The men took me to the house in which the tradesmen lived. There were a few other Jews there who had also miraculously survived. Amongst them was a doctor. He managed, with a simple kitchen knife, to extract the bullet from my shoulder. In that house I also met a good friend of mine. I asked him how he had survived. He told me that the murderers had kept him alive so that he could bury the dead.

He had buried, with his own hands, his parents, his brothers and his sisters along with their children.

The Christian dwellers of the surrounding neighbourhoods told me later that the ground of the big mass grave was moving up and down for a long time after that dreadful day, as many of those buried there were still alive underneath.

I and a few other Jews who were not residents of Volozyn, decided to go back to our hometown, to Olshan. In normal times, it was a walk of about three to four hours. We walked for two days on side-roads and tracks, gripped by the fear of our enemy, which was lurking everywhere.

When we reached Olshan, the Jews there stared at us as if we had just returned from the dead. They had already heard about the destruction of the Volozyn Ghetto. They did not expect to see us alive.”

This hero was my father and this is but one of his heroic experiences during that horrific chapter in our Jewish history. What a blessing it has been to be his daughter, to bear with great pride his endurance “for one moment more,”  his determination to survive, to defy death and live to pass on his legacy to the world. On this day, as on every other day, his blood flows through my veins reminding me of our unwavering Jewish pledge: “Never Again!”

B’ma-alot k’doshim ut-horim (The Ascension of the Holy and Pure)

                                                                                                                    

The above title is taken from the El Maleh Rachamim ("G-d Full of Compassion") prayer. This prayer is dedicated to the soul of the departed person.  It is recited by a Cantor at a Jewish funeral. It is also recited on days of remembrance for the deceased and various other occasions or days in the Hebrew calendar such as his or her death anniversary (Yahrzeit). This prayer, packed with very powerful imagery, is also recited publicly during memorial days such as Yom Ha'Shoa dedicated to the victims of the holocaust and Memorial Day commemorating Israel's fallen soldiers.T

Unfortunately in recent years, we have been hearing it more often for  the souls of our young departed soldiers who died in the wars defending the Jewish state.  We have also been hearing it recited for the untimely death of the many innocent victims of terror. A few days ago, it was recited at Shira Banki's funeral.

“B’ma-alot k’doshim ut-horim “ is but one line taken from this important and compelling prayer.  It refers to the heavenly stairs leading to the spheres where only the Holy and Pure could ever set foot as they make their way towards their eternal rest under the Wings of the Schechina.  For me, it is the most meaningful one.   It is generally here, at this point of the prayer that some frozen river within me thaws and a gush of tears bursts forth.
I have often wondered, why?  What in this particular line, which I have heard so many times, always triggers that response in me, and why then?  I believe I may have finally discovered the answer.
For many years, and for some odd reason, I would impatiently wait for the cantor to reach that line.  Once he did, I would immediately close my eyes.  That is where I stopped listening to rest of it. It simply did not matter.  My essence was being taken over by this very gripping vision that unfolded itself upon hearing that line.  I could never fully articulate it.  Somehow it seemed too holy to lend itself to be expressed in mundane language. Let me try to share it with you.

In the vision unfurling itself to me, I could see a stairway mounting to an unseen realm.  I could never see its top.  It was always mantled with pure white clouds.  I could only imagine  what it cradled or embraced behind  the blinding and brightly glaring splendor that adorned it - A sight reserved for the selected and very privileged, to those pure and holy souls making their way towards it.

My mind’s eye would then wander to the borders of the hanging stairs where transparent angelic entities were standing on each side of them.  Their soft tender eyes were caressing the holy and pure ascenders, women, men, children, young and old as they were slowly making their way towards the top of the stairs, to where I could only dream of getting one day.

That vision is all I ask and want to be worthy of and blessed to experience one day.  The wish to  walk in their footsteps and reunite with them under the wings of the Schechina is what my soul longs to undergo one day.  To walk in their path towards that one place is all that my soul has yearned and continues to yearn for.  The fear that I may not, rages in me, stirring the strongest emotional storm, unleashing the rivers of tears, which I pray to G-d, will cleanse my soul, wash away my sins and prepare me  to join their exalted assembly.