I light a candle so their memory doesn’t fade from this earth.
I light a candle for my parents who survived the concentration camps.
I light a candle for my mother and father’s siblings who survived, too.
I light a candle for my mother’s eight brothers and sisters who died in the ghetto from starvation and sickness in Poland, and for the ones who died in the camps from murder.
I light a candle for my grandparents, both sets, who died in the ghetto and who I never could have met.
I light a candle for the survivors who did more than survived- after the war they found love, had children and looked to the future.
I light a candle I light a candle to the ones who right after the war went a fought in the Independence was in Israel so we’d have somewhere to go if expelled from a country or were in danger. How many could have been saved if countries of the world didn’t turn back the boats carrying expelled Jews and return them to Europe.
I light a candle for m y parents who came the US with no English, no education and no money. They had four kids, started businesses, a survived. Their legacy is the fact that each of us have college degrees and higher, work in fields of our choosing, and have realized the dream they didn’t have for themselves.
I light a candle for my parents four grandkids and three great-grand kids.
Thanks all you guys. My family and I will be a local Synagogue listening to my mother speak on this occasion. She and my dad are rapidly becoming the last of the living survivors and it will become so important that the memory of this lives on through me to my kids and on through theirs.
Their suffering cannot have been in vain. I have a tumultuous relationship with my parents- it’s hard being raised by people so profoundly damaged by life. But on this point we stand together.
They have both participated in Steven Spielberg’s Shoah project, although I cannot make myself listen to that tape.
My grandfather came to this country from Poland, in the early 1900s. He learned English and worked hard to bring his siblings over, but had to leave his large extended family in Poland. Not one of them survived the Holocaust.
And we need to remember those who were also butchered, beyond the 6 million Jews: the gypsies and handicapped and homosexuals (the first to wear the “pink triangle”), whose lives were considered “expendable.”
Thanks for that! I’m so glad that someone else here beat me to this point. I get the impression sometimes when I bring those groups up that people think I mean to devalue or sully the reputation of the Jewish victims. Or that grouping them together as victims does. Or something. At times it even seems like the sentiment is that THOSE groups (esp. the homosexuals)- well, that was somewhat understandable…yet these people still get all indignant about what happened to the Jews.
THAT"S super scary to me- the implication that some people were more appropriately chosen for the awful fate that awaited them than others.
In any case, I have just lighted a candle remember the victims as well.
No disagreement about the others- I was taught about them too and honor their memory as well. But it is different- not better or worse- the plan for the Jews, specifically.
I was gonna say “It’s all good” except that that would seem odd.
I didn’t mean to imply that you were exclusionary in any way. Sorry if there was even a hint of that, as I was rambling about people I met in the past and decidedly not your thoughtful OP.
I really appreciate you saying this, because I was feeling a little bad. This thread really was a memorial to my family’s experience and not meant to exclude other’s experiences.
Home now. My mother gave an impossibly beautiful and horrible speech. Her town in Poland had 200,000 Jews before the war. When the allies liberated the ghetto, after most of the people had died of starvation or sent to the camps there were 11 people in hiding. They were from my family. 200,000 down to 11. That Jewish center of culture and society erased from this planet. That was what we Jews lost. We may have survived as a people, but not as the same people. Our presence in Europe was erased.
I know how you feel. My mother’s immediate family (6 people) are the only Jewish survivors from the town in eastern Hungary they came from, as far as we know.
Wow. My mother started her speech by saying that her story was only one of millions and for every story you hear there are so many that never get said.
Before my kids went to bed last night I told them that the world is good, we are safe and this story is only a part of who our family is. I wanted them to sleep with the thought of hope.
Thank you all who lit a candle- it really gives me hope as well.