Today is the worst day of the year. It is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Israeli year has two days that are extremely heavy to get through; one is today and the other one is in about a week from now and is the Memorial Day for fallen soldiers.

A new day starts at sun down and lasts until the next sun down. Last night had the lightening of candles and the memorial ceremonies at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem) and other places. Today all the schools have their ceremonies and there has been a moment of quiet to honor to the memory of those who perished during World War II.

The most chocking experience for me when I arrived in Israel the first time in 1976 was that the Holocaust didn’t only belong to the history books. I actually met people who had “walked through the valley of death” and I couldn’t really tell if they had come out alive.
A human being is some kind of a body, soul and spirit-trinity and it seems like it is possible to kill part of that while the person is still “walking among the living”.
According to the historians 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. According to me the number is much higher. I have seen dead people walking.

We still have some of them among us. Judah is an old friend of mine who originally came from Lodz in Poland. The Ghetto of Lodz had 230.000 Jews in it to begin with and another 25.000 were added later. By the end of the war only 877 Lodz Jews remained.
My friend was transported to a concentration camp together with his younger brother but they ended up in different barracks because of the age. One day his brother had managed to sneak over because he didn’t want to be on a transport leaving for some other place.
My friend told me, as tears were running down his face, that he took his brother by the hand and brought him over to one of the camp guards. He was afraid of being punished and was going to apologize on his brothers behalf and explain the situation to him. The next thing he knew was himself laying on the ground being beaten while his brother was carried away crying and screaming. That was the last he saw of his brother.
My friend is an old man by now but he never managed to get his life back on track. He collects whatever people throw away and fills up his house and garden with the junk. It is as if he does not allow himself to enjoy life and he is constantly blaming himself for existing. “He was younger than me but he understood what was going on. My brother was smarter than me.” Judah is the only one left from his family.

One of his neighbors told me that he was “a cute little blond girl” during the Holocaust. His mother dressed him up as a girl and let his hair grow so that the Nazis wouldn’t find out that he was Jewish.

I have met lots of people with numbers tattooed on their arms. Most of them do not feel comfortable wearing short sleeves.
---A group leader from England once asked me if the survivors saw themselves as heroes. I was shocked by the question and by the way it was asked and found it hard to answer.—In order to ask smart question there is a need for a certain base of knowledge. Some question reveals the “screaming “ lack of such. All the Holocaust survivors that I have met are still struggling to survive.

The Holocaust Museum in Israel is called Yad VaShem which means a “place and a name”. Isaiah: 56,4-5 sais:” To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths and choose what pleases Me, and hold fast My covenant, even to them I will give in My house and within My walls a place and a name better than that of sons and daughters: I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

Elin Elkouby