An Answer to Hitler

This article was originally published in April, 2004.

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By: Paula R. Stern

May 2005

I was born on November 9. Kristallnacht. On November 9, 1938, the Nazis went on a rampage, burning, destroying, killing. From an early age, I felt different from my friends. History weighed heavily on my mind. With an interest that bordered on obsession, I read about the creation of Israel, about the Holocaust, and finally about the Eichmann trial.

Born more than 20 years after the Holocaust, but on a day that still brings back the collective pain of a people on the brink of disaster, my mother calls me her answer to Hitler. The Holocaust happened. Over 6 million Jews were murdered. I am guilty of the same crime as they were - that of being Jewish. But my very existence, and that of my children, is the best response we can give to Hitler and all anti-Semites.

Two of my sons are named for great uncles, murdered by the Nazis. One died in Auschwitz shortly after he was married, the second died in the forest, too weak to go on. Two of my other children are named for Holocaust survivors, orphaned young and scarred for life. Despite their pain, they survived and went on to marry, build families and lives and give my children the special love that only grandparents can give.

When I read some message of hatred saying that the Holocaust is a hoax, or that Hitler would have been praised if he had limited himself to only killing this kind of Jew or that kind, despair threatens to weaken my resolve - but only momentarily.

An anti-Semite in California sends me a note written in German, a pathetic attempt to intimidate. An aging Frenchmen writes, "You are a malignant parasite, a 'good German' complicit in the war crimes of Nazi Israel, and the moment some brave Palestinian blows your brains out, it'll be a mitzvah [good deed] for good people everywhere."

I read the hatred, I hear the message and I understand what those who experienced Kristallnacht only suspected. There is a hatred out there that will not die. It is a reminder why we must fight harder for our country and never weaken ourselves.

You could drown in the hatred. "Death is too good for them [Israeli settlers]," writes the anti-Semite. "Death can not come soon enough to them all. Kill an Israeli settler. Save the World." Until you realize that this is what they want. They want our despair, they want our pain, they want us to remember the pain they inflict, and forget that we have found an answer.

I think of Shaye, my husband's grandfather. My husband never knew a grandparent's love because Hitler had a master plan. So Shaye was murdered, along with his wife and many of his children.

Today, there are six Shayes: one in Israel, one in Canada, three in New York, and one in Brazil. They are all strong, devoted Jewish men, committed to keeping the memory of Shaye alive.

As Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, arrives here in Israel and abroad, we are all faced with the memory and the pain of more than six million lives that ended too soon. In Israel, even before the day approaches, the radio is filled with the voices of Holocaust survivors, desperately trying to tell their stories.

Just saying the names of their mothers and fathers still makes their voices break in sorrow and it isn't hard to hear the tears, or the anger when they mention a younger brother or sister, too weak to have survived. His 4-year-old brother was thirsty and he still remembers his older brother trying to comfort the young boy, explains one survivor. Soon, soon you will drink. Rest now.

She never got the chance to say goodbye to her father and brother, explains another. Her mother kept her alive and forced her to get up and join the roll call, or she wouldn't be here now.

He remembers his bar mitzvah in the ghetto just before being deported and tries to explain to others what it was like to find himself orphaned with his brothers and sisters. You cannot imagine, he cries, and the tears that have fallen each year for more than half a century, bring forth my tears and those who listen. There is no comfort, no end to the pain of an eighty year old man who still thinks of himself as an orphan.

My mother-in-law was in a gas chamber, pulled out at the last minute for a work detail. My father-in-law was in a Russian work camp and never really considered himself a survivor, yet he lost his mother and father, two brothers and countless cousins and aunts and uncles and all his grandparents.

Each year in Israel, six candles are lit, six stories told. Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Poland and Germany. France, Turkey, Greece, Russia, Denmark and Holland. Latvia and Ukraine. And everywhere in between. The scope, the pain, the plan. It is hard to remember, impossible to forget.

A trip to Poland raises more questions than it answers. Stand in the gas chamber and beg the room to reveal its secrets. Cement walls close in on you. Who can guess how many died in the spot where you stand. How many ashes, how many shoes in Maidanek? Seventeen thousand stones in Treblinka for the communities, but how many stones for the people? A picture from my son's bar mitzvah left near the crematoria in Auschwitz. Let them see the land of Israel as we have made it today. A baby's grave in Chelmno, and bones that still come to the surface in the rain. Shmuel died not far from here. Shaye. Raiza. Chana. Yehoshua. Benyamin Elimelech. Chaim Lazer. Gabriella. My family cries out to me as I stand in Auschwitz and cry for them. My great-grandmother. My great aunts. My husband's grandparents.

To focus on the past is impossible without the strength that can be drawn from the present, without the picture of my children I carried with me every minute, and without the knowledge that within a few days, I would be home in Israel. If we had had our country then, Hitler never would have succeeded. "We came 50 years too late," the IDF Chief of Staff explained in 1995. Now, we know that the world cannot do what it once did because we have changed the world by returning to ourselves.

On the morning of Yom HaShoah in Israel, all over the land, a siren is sounded. For two minutes it will wail and all of Israel will stop. It is fitting to remember the past and know from where you come. Cars, buses, people in the middle of their day, shopping, walking, eating, everything stops. It looks like something out of the Twilight Zone, a world suddenly frozen in grief, while a nation stops to remember and to mourn.

Then, when the siren stops, we get back into our cars, go back to our coffee, our shopping, our newspapers. We do not forget, but we live on. Stronger for having remembered, better for having survived.

The six Shayes, my children and I, young children here in Israel and around the world - we are all answers to Hitler and the anti-Semites who still burn synagogues, attack Jews in the streets, and send hate-filled messages through the Internet and the mail. By committing ourselves to the future, we cannot prevent another Holocaust, but we can deny Hitler his victory by holding true to the values he despised.

Hitler did succeed in killing most of European Jewry, but he failed in his primary aim. He did not destroy Judaism, and he did not destroy Shaye.

As we commemorate Yom HaShoah this year, take a moment to remember and mourn. Remember and live. Remember.

Copyright: Paula Stern 2005. All rights reserved.