In the Jewish calendar, today is the nineteenth day of the month of Nissan. That means that it's Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Which means it's time for my annual Yom HaShoa post.
When I think about how the Holocaust affects my life, I think of my abba's father, my saba. His
story is the glaring one. He lived through the Holocaust. His family fled their home to escape deportation, but were caught and deported anyway. My great-grandfather died in an accident: while trying to build a shelter for the family, a beam collapsed and fell toward my grandfather. His dad pushed him out of the way and was crushed instead. By working and planning, he managed to keep himself, his mom and his brother alive.
All of these pieces had to work together for me to be alive today. What if they had just been killed instead of marched to Transnistria? What if he had been killed by the beam? What if they had gotten typhus or one of the other diseases that were running rampant, or had frozen or starved?
This is the natural, obvious place that my mind goes on days like this. But there are more parts to my past than that.
Last week was Passover and I ditched school for a week (what, I did all the work to make it up!) to be with my family. At one of the meals, I was telling my dad about an article that I had read about kosher food on the Titanic and other luxury ships of the time. I mentioned that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society records talk about it. Usually my dad would tell me about a related article that he read, but instead he looked at his mother, my bubbe, and said, "Ma, tell the story of how your dad came to Canada."
I had never heard this story. My grandfather kind of overshadowed it. But here is the story that she told:
Her father lived in Russia. In 1913, he was almost sixteen. On the night of Purim (when we celebrate the rescue of the Jews from the plot of Haman) his mother came to him. She was concerned because he was getting older and- oh, fun little postscript- since the 1840s, all Jewish men got conscripted into the Russian army. With this in mind, she obtained a Canadian visa though a friend who had already emigrated, and bribed a soldier to let him out of town. So that night, he headed off to hear the
megilla (the story of Purim) and instead slipped out of town and left his family (he never saw them again) and took a ship to Canada. He arrived in Philadelphia on the first day of Passover. He didn't get off because he was bound for Canada, but women from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society came aboard and brought them matzah. A few days later, he got off at the port in Halifax.
Later that year, my great-grandmother and her family landed in Canada as well. By "her family," I mean her, her parents and her sisters. They left her brothers back in Romania for a little while because what they were most concerned about was not the boys going to the army, but the girls being kidnapped and raped. So they needed to wait and raise money to bring the boys over.
These aren't Holocaust stories. Somehow, these are the stories of the people who
got out of Europe. Antisemitism was something that was sickeningly prevalent before the Holocaust. Many strong Jewish leaders from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Jews who didn't identify as such until they witnessed the commonality of antisemitism. Ze'ev Jabotinsky reported on the Kishinev pogrom. Theodor Herzl reported on the Dreyfus Affair (where the French army basically looked at a list of people who had the access to military secrets to sell to the Germans, and accused Alfred Dreyfus because he MUST be the one. After all, you know how Jews aren't loyal to their countries and should never have been in the army in the first place).
I think what really most bothers me (possibly because it actually affects my life currently) is that antisemitism isn't gone today. One of my really good friends here at school, a really sweet, smart girl from Oklahoma, told me that she was taught that food in America is so expensive because the Jews charge lots of money to make it kosher. She didn't overhear this on the street or get told on the playground by some asshole kid. She was
taught that in her public high school classroom by a teacher.
And the worst part of it is that no one spoke up, because they didn't know any better or because they were scared or because they didn't care. Today from 10 AM until 7 PM, Hillel set up speakers and a podium in a very main part of campus. It was a beautiful day and there were lots of students outside, walking past or sitting around. They had a rotation of speakers there, faculty and students, and for nine hours, they just read from a giant binder of names of people who died. They had to use a ruler to keep track because the type was so small. I was there for only twenty minutes, and it was oppressive. "Aaron Levin, Abraham Levin, Adelle Levin, Alexander Levin..." No biographical information, place or dates of birth or death, just the list of names. Nine hours. Unrelenting. And people barely stopped.
So share. There are plenty of people who don't have anyone left to tell their stories. You can remember them, so this is never forgotten.
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