Each Shabbat, when we hear the same Torah portion that was read in the previous year, it feels different. Because I am different.
Each holiday season, be it the chant of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers or the recitation of the Haggadah, it feels different, because I am different.
I have changed.
I have lived another year of new experiences that have shaped me, that have given me new eyes in which I may experience or perceive a situation, a tradition or a ritual. Ihave a new perspective than I had up until this point.
So it is with the annual Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. Each year it’s the same, yet so vastly different.
As soon as Pesach ends, the mood shifts. There is the awareness that it will be Holocaust Memorial Day and, soon after, Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror.
One Memorial Day is reflective of the cost to the Jewish people of not having the modern state of Israel, the cost reflected in the incomprehensible number of six million losses. The other Memorial Day is reflective of the cost of having a Jewish sovereign state of our own. Last year, the agonizing cost stood at 25,034 fallen soldiers. Since the Oct. 7 war began up to today, the cost is 848 more families heartbreakingly having joined the circle known as the families of the bereaved.
Compared to my childhood, my Holocaust Memorial Day experiences today are so different.
In the background was always our family’s losses. My mother was bereft of grandparents or aunts and uncles, nearly all of them having been murdered in the Holocaust.
Yet, when I was little, and for decades thereafter, many survivors would be part of the day’s essence.
In Israel —a classmate’s father who had survived, a classmate’s mother who had been a hidden child in Holland —just a natural part of my horizon on a daily basis, included seeing people with their tattooed arms.
Then I came to Denver, and our shul was filled with many survivors of the Holocaust and their tragic, traumatic stories, side by side with their richly heroic and inspirational lives of overcoming. Their survivor stories that we couldn’t ever fully comprehend, their scarred yet triumphant lives, their mere noble presence as they uttered the prayers in shul, as they passed the torch of history on to us.
We became part of that history, together with them. We melded into one multi-generational congregation, another response to the Holocaust.
In time and with the years, there were memorials in Denver, in Israel, in New York City. Evocative Yiddish melodies sung with foreign accents. Heart stopping testimonies. Prayers. Remembrances.
It was a day that parted the veiled curtains that stood between us and the survivors, many of whom valiantly tried to live as normal as possible lives, not dwelling on the pain of their past, at least not publicly.
On Holocaust Memorial Day, that changed.
There was a pained emotional intimacy to the day, almost like a sense of “permission” for survivors to be open, to finally, for a moment, be fully vulnerable. Not misunderstood or encountering life with that invisible barrier that was erected. But even if only for a day, that barrier was gone. It was OK to talk about or at least to refer to “the war,” to “the camps.”
People who didn’t allow themselves to speak of the war, of the atrocities, of their pain, of their lost world, of their destroyed families, now they spoke. Or at least, they showed up, stood in solidarity with those who did speak. Perhaps feeling that those who were speaking, were bearing witness, were ventriloquizing their own voice.
Of course, there were some survivors who spoke openly of their pained story.
Each person coping in a unique way.
What is certain is that for the survivors, it was Holocaust Memorial Day, each and every day.
Each and every moment.
Ultimately, the formally dedicated day of Holocaust Memorial was more for us than for the survivors themselves.
As the years have passed, so have the many very dear and beloved survivors who I truly loved and gave me so much. And with their passing, their bearing witness, their stories, their anguish, their trauma, their inspiration, their re-building, their Yiddishkeit, their Old-World sensibilities, their laughter and their tears, and so many of their endless teachings and links in the chain of our history, passed with them.
Yet, it’s all still here. Infinite. A part of us all. A part of who each of us has become. Because of who they were, because of how they chose to transmit to us, because of how they lived and loved.
Those survivors who are still blessedly with us feel more and more precious as each Holocaust Memorial Day passes.
It is often the snippets and the details about the lives and stories of Holocaust survivors that stay with us. A heimish recipe with measurements of a bissel of this and a bissel of that, a wise perspective or an insight, a searing melody, a poem, a prayer, or a horrifying story.
I wouldn’t have expected my life to take the turn of meeting a survivor again, for the first time in 2023, and forging a bond anew so late in life, with someone who has become so very dear to me, and whom I cherish deeply.
There is much to share about this extraordinary gentleman’s story, a hidden baby in the war. How much I have learned from this brilliant man and his exquisite brand of wisdom and joy. With stoics like Epictetus as his guide, time and again throughout his life he has mastered the art of survival, of what it means to be knocked down — and yet again to rise. In fact, he embodies survival.
Because of this dear friend, alongside the usual Kel Maleh Rachamim prayer, and other poignant melancholy Yiddish songs like “Oyfn Pripetchik” that was popularized by Itzhak Perlman’s sublime version of it for the soundtrack of “Schindler’s List,” the unlikely —Mozart’s violin concerto symphony #1 (K207) — is now also melded into that music, an amalgamation that makes up a unique composite of evocative Holocaust memories.
When my friend was just a little boy, all of six years old, coping with being alone in the world, his parents having been murdered in the war —a rootless little boy, carrying that profound kind of loneliness, and living by the kindness of his Christian foster family — one night as he was lying in bed, suddenly a beautiful piece of music came on the radio. It enveloped him in a tremendous kind of comfort and peace. At the end of the musical piece, he heard the radio announcer say that it was Mozart’s Symphony Number One (and it was followed by Mozart symphony Number Two, which he found equally mesmerizing and comforting).
From that day on, he sought this piece of music. At age six, he began learning to play the piano, riding his bike through the fields in the Holland countryside so as not to miss his piano lessons. He went on to became a masterful classical music pianist, a hobby alongside his profession as a physics and mathematics professor, and inventor.
Today, when I hear him play this Mozart piece himself, in my mind’s eye I am transported to a Holland, which I have never even been to, at the side of this little sweet brilliant boy, who I only encountered in his 80s.
Unexpectedly, Mozart’s symphonies now too belong with all the rest of my accumulated Holocaust Memorial memories, melodies, agonies, triumphs, friendships, legacies and loves.
An added layer, with which I approach the annual Holocaust Memorial Day, in a new light, for me this year.
Because a new friendship with another Holocaust survivor has made me different.
© IJN 2025
