This Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel I have officially outlived my great-grandmother Rose, who was murdered in Auschwitz at 27 years old. With the explosion of antisemitism everywhere, I am also wondering if I’m walking in her footsteps.
Everything I know about her is contained in this letter she wrote to her Christian friend, Lena, before she was deported:
Dear Madam,
From one mother’s heart to yours. It is with a broken heart that a mother must separate herself from the one that is her thirst and reason to live, who remembers that one day you have alluded to a similar situation and did not imagine it so close, and alas, that it could even become reality. I beg you, Madam, be a mother to my little Henri for as long as possible. My life belongs to you. Do not refuse me this last demand, and may G-d be with you.
His mother full of despair,
Dancygierkron
Henri was my grandfather. He was only five when the SS came to round up his family along with all the other Jews in Brussels. They forced the men to strip in their hunt for circumcisions. My young grandfather couldn’t understand why his father would take down his pants in public. It didn’t make sense. He probably also couldn’t understand why his parents told the Nazis, “He’s not our son.” It was the last thing he ever heard them say. Lena and her husband risked their lives—and the life of their only son, Robert —to take my grandfather in after that. He hid in the attic of their hotel, surviving through cold, hunger, and the Nazi soldiers sleeping just below him. He subsisted by sneaking down to the kitchen at night and collecting scraps off the meat slicer.
Eventually, he had a false baptism and was able to live as Lena and her husband’s fake son, as Robert’s fake brother. He became a Jew hiding in plain sight, just like his grandmother, who was in hiding in a nursing home across the street. She too had somehow evaded the Nazis, but Henri could never go to her, never speak with her. He was told he could never even look at her through the window for fear of some connection being made and them both being found out. By the time he turned 10 in 1945, he’d already spent half his young life in hiding. But by then, the Allied powers had won, the war was over, and Auschwitz had been liberated. So he went to the train station to await his parents’ return. Only they never came.
The anxiety he felt over the possibility that he’d simply missed them nearly ate him alive; everyone coming off the trains all looked the same—the men and the women—all emaciated, all shaved, all wearing prisoner's clothes. All with vacant expressions. I don’t know how long he lived fostering the belief that there was a chance they’d survived. But eventually, the Nazi documentation would be all the proof he’d need: both his parents, three of his grandparents, his uncle—nearly his entire family—were all murdered in Auschwitz.
It’s difficult to find anything but sorrow in my grandfather’s story. And try as we might to convince the world that “Never Again” is everyone’s responsibility, the world is failing. According to the Claims Conference, nearly one-third of Americans believe that far less than six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Almost half of Americans can’t name a single concentration camp or ghetto out of the 40,000+ that existed. And research suggests that those with less knowledge of the Holocaust are much more prone to believing antisemitic tropes. Throughout my life, I’ve heard countless people say they can’t imagine how the Holocaust could’ve happened. But looking back at the 1930’s, I never wondered how it happened. Instead, I always wondered why Jews hadn’t gotten out of Europe while they still had the chance. I would read books or watch movies and think, Run! Leave! What are you waiting for? But now I look in the mirror and wonder if I’m one of those Jews who can’t see what’s waiting just ahead.
Because if those statistics that were published before October 7 were bad, the antisemitism rising around the globe after October 7 is even worse. And it is eerily reminiscent of the past.
There are the college protests where keffiyeh-clad students, faculty, and staff form human chains to block Jews from entering campus. Nazis did the same thing to Jews in 1938. There was the Jewish baby in London whose place of birth, Israel, was crossed out. The Dagestan airport in Russia was overrun with rioters looking to hunt Jews on a flight that had just landed from Israel. There’s everyone from high school students to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib openly calling for the genocide of Jews by chanting “From the river, to the sea, Palestine will be free,” among other things.
The ADL has recorded a 360% spike in antisemitic incidents in the US following October 7. Globally, that increase was 500%. This Yom HaShoah, the past and present are colliding, but we can’t wait for history to repeat itself. We had a glimpse of that happening on October 7, and in its aftermath, we’ve seen exactly how the Holocaust was made possible by those foolish or hateful enough to despise Jews.
But unlike my grandfather and his family—unlike all the other Jews of the 1930’s and 40’s—we have Israel. Right now, in its war against Hamas, Israel is carrying out its purpose for existing by protecting the Jewish people. When Iran launched 300+ missiles at Israel, I listened to the Israeli air force roaring overhead and took in the sounds of Jewish defence for my family who never had the chance to hear it. Also unlike the Jews of the Holocaust, we have the support of the majority, despite the horrifying statistics on rising antisemitism. A new Harvard CAPS-Harris survey revealed that 80% of Americans support Israel over Hamas. I have tremendous hope: we may have to fight to get there, but we will come out on the other side of this darkness.
This Yom HaShoah, I will think about my grandfather, and his parents, Isaac and Rose. I’ll think about their parents and brothers and sisters, and all the Jews like them whose lives were stolen. I’ll think of the fearless family who saved my grandfather, and how I’m only alive because of their bravery. I’ll think about the hostages still in Gaza—not memories of the past but Jews suffering right now. I’ll think of the lives taken on October 7. The families broken. But I will also think about everything my grandfather became—everything he accomplished—despite the evil that could’ve completely destroyed him. He came to New York when he was 15, learned English, and eventually went to Brooklyn College. He earned his degree in chemistry and got married, having four children, seven grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. He was the stage manager for the New York State Theatre (now the David H. Koch Theatre) in Lincoln Center.
That is the Jewish spirit. The spirit that drives Jews to not only survive but to thrive. To make take something and make it better, to never stop working for what’s good and what’s right. There is nothing not a single thing throughout thousands of years of history that has ever been able to break it. And there never will be.
