As another Holocaust Memorial Day is upon us, I feel its sense of urgency. Most of us are the ones who are becoming the witnesses. We are the witnesses to the witnesses.
As the Holocaust survivors in our midst whom we love and cherish dwindle year by year, and most of those who are blessedly still with us become tangibly more frail, we see history passing by us before our eyes.
We can feel the “bearing witness” slipping through the cracks of Holocaust history.
There was a time when we did not need to do anything formal to confront the memory of the Holocaust. No effort was needed. Going to shul, davening in a congregation, we stood shoulder to shoulder with survivors, their stories and their vignettes, which made their way into conversations, into prayers from deep within that electrified the synagogue atmosphere, or memories that suddenly rose to the surface and arrested you in rapt attention. It could be at a conversation at a kiddush in shul, a stirring phrase of prayer, or even just a look or wordless unfurling of tefilin straps that exposed a survivor’s number tattoo.
There was always that formal day dedicated to remembrance. But the testimony and the trauma, the resilience and the remembrance, were, to an extent, all around us ,all the time.
About 10 or 15 years ago, a movement in Israel called “Zikaron ba-Salon,” “Remembering in our Living Room,” was launched. The idea was to invite a survivor into your apartment, into the intimacy of your own living room, to host on Holocaust Memorial Day an evening of friends and family to bear witness to a survivor’s personal story of bearing witness.
Perhaps it stems from that sense of urgency stemming from the oncoming and inevitable, the very last survivor; but as the years have passed this intimate evening of storytelling has increased in inverse proportion to the dwindling community of actual survivors.
Last year, with Holocaust Remembrance Day falling during COVID and Israel’s lockdown, not only was this new ritual of Zikaron ba-Salon honored via Zoom, but as if to show how nothing will stop “bearing witness” by survivors, commitment to Zikaron ba-Salon surged.
The year, many in Israel are already vaccinated, but nonetheless circumspection is exercised to ensure public safety, and especially the safety of the elderly and vulnerable, so indoor gatherings like Zikaron ba-Salon are still avoided.
Still, since Israel is no longer on lockdown, in the spirit of this new ritual of Zikaron ba-Salon, the Israeli landscape has been transformed. Many municipalities across the land opened outdoor public spaces to be set up as little pods of “living rooms”to ensure the intimate storytelling of “bearing witness.” Some masked, some not, sit outdoors in makeshift “living rooms” listening to their “living room’s” survivor, one of the last, as they themselves become history’s witnesses to the witnesses.
Budapest, 1944. Auschwitz, 1942. The ghetto. Poland, 1939. Death marches. The trains. My mother. My father. The Gestapo. The Nazis. The crematoria. Sonderkommando. The starvation. The cruelties. The grit. The sheer miracles. And the phrase so oft heard, “the last time I saw my . . . ” Each survivor’s story melting into the next one’s, as a mosaic of Holocaust remembrance emerges.
We each carry our own personal mosaic of Holocaust remembrance stories from cherished friends and family. We each carry the intimacy of stories that unfolded in our family’s living rooms, in our shuls, at our Shabbat meals and at all those unexpected places, in unexpected ways.
My grandparents were fortunate not to live through the war on European soil, but only by the skin of their teeth were they escapees — and also, the near sole survivors of their families. They were haunted by the war; my great-aunt and great-uncle were Auschwitz survivors; and so were many cherished friends in the community . . . this is my personal mosaic of Holocaust resilience, replete with wounded people, limping with carried pain, yet tall and proud and strong and modeling what truly overcoming sheer evil looks like.
The gut wrenching pouring out of the late Fred Englard’s “Ka Ribbon” as twilight deepened and the sanctity of Sabbath was receding; the ever dignified late Mrs. Weissbrot’s sudden, piercing cry of “Shma Koleinu” and her soft singing of a line from a Partisan’s Anthem; and, may they live for many more healthy more years, Cantor Isaac Koll, the youngest survivor with the famous Bielski Brothers on the run in the forests; and Cantor Zachary Kutner, seven times (!) a survivor of Mengele’s evil inspections — their never ending singing, pouring forth with their emotion all that they carry, never ceases to move and stir me.
This too is a mosaic. The stories of wordless emotion that seeps into song — their being able to continue singing is itself a deeply held bearing witness and resilience. Perhaps their emotion even fuels their resilience.
These and so many others who are precious to me are indelibly on my heart, this Holocaust Memorial Day.
When I was growing up in Israel, I’d see random people on the public buses, with numbered tattooes. I’d heard the whispers of what they were and what they meant. I heard words, “camps” and “Auschwitz,” “Nazis” and “Shoah.” But as a little girl I couldn’t fully understand.
I believe the very first people I ever heard a formal Holocaust testimony from was my girlhood friend and classmate Tovi Kleinman’s parents. With her head of adorable blond curls and freckled face, we would sometimes cross the street at the end of the school day to her apartment to play, talk or peruse over Sears catalogues of girly dresses. But then one day in third or fourth grade, her parents visited our classrooms, and spoke to us about their experiences.
Her mother, I recall, was a hidden child in Holland. I still remember her speaking to us about the brave and devoted family who hid her. I remember her ordeal as a little girl when for the first time she ate something nonkosher. I remember how this family became her only family in this world, and how, to this day, she remained in close contact with this righteous gentile.
Mr. Kleinman, Tovi’s father, was an Auschwitz survivor. Originally from Hungary, he was a teen during his time in the camps.
One thing I remember him sharing with us was how he and his family were forced to leave their apartment suddenly, it was like a reverse Exodus. His mother had been baking bread, but it never had a chance to rise or complete the baking process. With the Nazis’ death threats and demands, the family left with the heat of burning hot bread straight from the oven, their mother having stuffed it into the bags on their backs.
This is how Mr. Kleinman left his home for the last time, with the burning bread that never had a chance to rise. To this day I think of him and my friend Tovi and her father’s family’s story every seder night.
Mr. Kleinman became well known in Israel as the youngest witness at the Eichmann Trial in 1961.
He is the founder of this modern day movement in Israel of Holocaust memory — of Zikaron ba-Salon.
He has never stopped telling his story, be it in the classroom of his youngest daughter or in living rooms across Israel or in this year’s outdoor “living rooms,” set up across Israel.
Although he has no clue who I am, he is very much a part of my personal mosaic of memories, personas and bearing witness. He was the first of what has turned out to be many.
His story lives on. All the shared stories of the survivors in our lives, they and their astonishing stories live on. Year to year in these salons, and forevermore embedded deep in our hearts.
Access Zikaron ba-Salon via JEWISHcolorado.org.
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