On this Holocaust Remembrance Day it feels more important than ever that we understand how such a nightmare could happen so that we ensure it doesn’t happen again to anyone.
It breaks my heart to see Jews taking away the lesson that it’s us against the world (as Prime Minister Netanyahu said today) instead of taking away the lesson that we must not allow fascists to divide us and turn us against each other by fighting over scraps of land and resources.
Yom Hashoah 5784
they told me
never to forget the Shoah and then reminded me every day
i have never needed their reminders the Shoah lives always in me in my life far, far way from the shtetl and in the absence left by family i never met and in the righteousness cradled deep in my heart and in the fear that clings to my doorstep like grave dust and that every morning i try to sweep away
they told me, cynically that we would never let it happen again but deep in their hearts, they cradled the fear and flocked to false idols
now i am reminded every day by images beamed to me across seas from the phone of a journalist murdered in my name
i feel the terror and confusion of unarmed men loaded onto flatbeds i feel it through remembrances of my great grandfather, who i could never know he was loaded onto a truck by men with guns and never seen again
i am reminded how we found his final resting place a mass grave in the forest floor just a few miles from the shtetl just a few days later they did not try very hard to conceal their crimes
that which is buried must always be unearthed that which is obscured, brought into the light
today they closed the offices of the journalists they have not yet murdered they have remembered, cynically and melted our memories into a golden idol shrouded in cloth, blue and white
– Yom Hashoah 5784, by Noah Gordon
