Statement on Yom haShoah 5770 (2010)

זכור את אשר עשה לך עמלק

Remember what Amalek did unto thee.

And I remember:

I remember myself as a child, a granddaughter of Shimon and Hadas Peterseil, who perished in Auschwitz.

I remember my mother sobbing at night, longing for her parents, whose terrible fate was then yet unknown.

I remember myself as a teenager. We were the first generation of post-Shoah “Sabras”; a generation of Israeli youth, living in “The Silent Era”, when talking about the Shoah with our parents was a taboo. The planned murder of six million Jews -- first in the ghettoes, then in Babi-Yar and its like, and later in gas chambers in concentration camps -- was perceived by us as “Sheep to Slaughter”.

I remember reading books and testimonies about the Shoah, unable to understand, to grasp, to believe the magnitude, the bestial cruelty, the atrocities, the unimaginable horror that befell the Jewish people.

And I remember the Eichmann trial in 1961, the trial that changed our attitude towards the Shoah and its perpetrators, but more than that, towards its victims and survivors.

I remember vividly and clearly the short and dramatic testimony of Kazetnick, a writer who survived the death camps and dedicated the rest of his life to commemorate the Shoah and to unfold the terrible, devastating existence in Auschwitz. Kazetnick, whose books helped to define the Shoah for my generation, was a witness for the prosecution in Eichmann’s trial. He could not endure the tension of reliving the horrors suffered, and after two minutes of testifying he fainted on the stand. Yet, his few words managed to enfold more than many volumes of evidence.

I remember his trembling voice trying to describe the indescribable, the chronicle of the Planet of Auschwitz:

“Time there was not like here on earth…..the inhabitants of that planet had no names, they had no parents, nor did they have children.”

Yet, here we are to give them names, to recall how they looked, the remember the way they lived and the way they died, and we swear never to forget.

We owe this to them. We owe this to ourselves. For there can be no future to the Jewish people without the memory of our past.

May the memory of the victims we mourn today, grant us the wisdom and determination to enhance our Jewish heritage in the face of all threats, for the glory of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.