Apr 17/2015

Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2015: The Anguish of Liberation and the Return to Life: Seventy Years since the End of WWII

This week we commemorated the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust.  Holocaust survivor and poet Abba Kovner strikingly illustrates the conflicted state of anguish in light of liberation. He wrote of a story of a Jewish woman survivor he met in Vilna who he met her when he arrived at the site of the destroyed ghetto with liberating Soviet soldiers. For almost a year, the woman and her young daughter had hidden in a small nook, and had come out from their hiding place for the first time after liberation. As her mother broke down in tears, relating their experiences for the first time, the child asked her, surprised: "Mame, men tor shoyn weinen? – Mommy, is it okay to cry now?"

On May 8^th, the defeated Germans capitulated to the Allied Forces. That day of liberation, the one for which every Jew had longed throughout the years of the Holocaust, was for most of them a day of crisis and emptiness, a feeling of overwhelming loneliness as they grasped the sheer scale of the destruction on both the personal and communal level.

Piercing questions arose in the minds of the survivors: How would they be able to go back to living a normal life, to build homes and families?

During the Holocaust, many Jews lived with the feeling that they were the last Jews to survive. Having survived against all odds, what obligation did they bear towards those who had not - was it their duty to preserve and commemorate their legacy? Were the survivors to avenge them, as they demanded before their death?

The overwhelming majority of survivors set out on a path of rehabilitation, while commemorating the world that was no more. As early as the first days and weeks after liberation, survivors began to recover and organize themselves. Many of them became a significant factor in the Zionist movement's international aspirations towards the establishment of a Jewish state.

About two-thirds of the survivors who chose not to remain in Europe after the war set their sights on Eretz Israel, despite the policies imposed by the British Mandate that barred them from entering into the Land

The illegal immigration movement – the Ha'apala – was a pivotal stage in the survivors' postwar recovery process. Holocaust survivors contributed, each in their own way, to building a better world for themselves, for their children and for future generations. They contributed immensely to the building of the nascent State of Israel.

Today, as we commemorate the memory of the six million Jews who perished, we should also reaffirm our commitment to continue assisting those survivors in need to build that better world for themselves, their children and future generations – a  world that will never again know and experience the horrors of the holocaust. 

Shabbat Shalom,

  

Yaron Sideman
Consul General Of Israel,
Mid-Atlantic Region