Keep Our Stories Alive

Tonight I sat in a sanctuary and listened to a man tell the crowd gathered there about how his entire family died. About how his hometown died. About how his entire life changed during World War II.

I sat with some of my 7^th grade students, who had taken part in the ceremony that evening. It’s Yom Hashoah right now. From last night’s sundown to tonight’s. A specific day that Jews take to memorialize and remember the Holocaust and the effect it has had on our people’s past and our people’s present.

I thought about being a sophomore in high school and hearing Elie Wisel speak at St. John’s college in Annapolis. How he told us about his life and the horror he had seen. He answered questions in a thick accent and I sat in the back of a room with maybe a hundred people, unable to comprehend the things that he had been forced to face.

I thought about the woman I met in Poland, who spoke with my high school group about her time in Berkanu. We were 16 and away from home and on a trip where we spent an entire week learning about the Holocaust. Reading ‘Night’ on the bus rides and moving between ghettos and shuls and museums and cemeteries. Crying a lot and holding hands, and feeling chills from the cold and from the sheer weight of what we were learning.

My generation is going to be the last generation to know survivors. To hear harrowing stories from the people who lived them. It’s our honor, and our duty to keep those stories alive.

My seventh grade students sat more quietly then I have ever seen them. They listened. They took everything in. At the beginning of our ceremony, spread around the room and holding yahrtzeit candles, they had read the names of children who had died in camps. The names were in Polish and German and Hungarian and French. They were young—two or twelve or seven or ten—and as my students read the names in a silent room full of people, I know that they understood the burden of our people’s history just a little bit more than they had before.

The Jewish people have a unique story. It’s full of tragedy and horror and but also survival. Of life, in the face death. Of remembrance. Of history. Of carrying on when no one really thought we could.

It’s our burden and our privilege to tell our stories. To make sure they live on. Just like our people always have.