I am many things as a person. I’m a woman, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend. A Jew. I love all my titles, but there is one I hold in special regard because it’s the reason I exist to be everything else that I am.
I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.
My grandmother survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Dachau. She fled a death march in the snow in 1945, hand in hand with her sister, and was met with her American liberators rather than the SS she feared would be her end.
My grandfather was a Partisan, a high-ranking leader among his Jewish brothers who led them from Auschwitz into the woods and back into the fire of the ongoing uprisings. He went where he was needed, and until the day he died at 92, he was humble. We didn’t learn much of his story, my cousins and I, from the man himself. No, grandpa was far too humble to tell us of his triumphs; humble and, of course, full of unspoken pain for all that he’d lost.
I always wanted to ask him, “Grandpa, has anyone ever apologized to you for everything you’ve lost?” But I kept quiet. Grandpa wasn’t the talking type. He told his story once, to Steven Spielberg, and never again. His and my grandmother’s testimonies helped ensure that Schindler’s List was made accurately and with the dignity it deserved. My grandmother, though, continued to share her testimony throughout the world. From Israel to Canada to DC, she refused to be silenced.
She and Grandpa crossed the world by ship to sit in the front rows at the Eichmann Trial to ensure justice was served with their own eyes.
She spoke at my school every year until I graduated. That was 13 speeches given to groups of my Jewish peers who sat, wide-eyed, at the opportunity to be in the presence of a survivor. She was there. She’d seen it. It, in a way, made her a bit of a celebrity when she walked into the Beit HaMikdash and took a seat.
Grandpa preferred his solitude. Most of the time I spent with him was watching cartoons or eating snacks at the kitchen table, listening to him muse melancholy about his time in Israel. He’d ask me about school, or we’d sit in silence, eating our soup, bread, and butter. We had an uncomplicated relationship. He told several people I was his favorite grandchild.
I’m 37 now, but what my peers didn’t know back then is that these human beings I am so grateful to have called my grandparents for the first 22 years of my life were a big deal to me, too. They were larger-than-life figures not only to the Jewish children my grandmother shared their story with, but also to me. When I ate bread and butter with grandpa, I was having a snack with a PARTISAN, a term I was raised around and knew to be serious. When I shopped for my Bat-Mitzvah dress with my grandma, I was in the presence of a woman who didn’t let the Nazis win. She was a presence to everyone who knew her, and I was lucky enough to be her grandchild.
I willingly and proudly carry the weight of these people because without their fight and unbreakable will to survive what should’ve ended them, I wouldn’t be here to enjoy the fruits of such a traumatic labor. To watch cartoons with my grandpa, to go swimming with my grandma.
The weight I carry, knowing it is up to me to uphold their legacy, is not one I take lightly. It’s not a weight I shirk responsibility for. I will carry it forever, until my last breath, I mean that literally. When I say I was born a Jew and I will die a Jew, I genuinely mean that.
Nothing. No one. Will take that away from me. I will never cower, never kneel, in the face of the thing that tried to wipe out my entire bloodline and failed.
On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I say: you will never stop me, I’m not going anywhere. We are not going anywhere.