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Time has a way of diluting how we remember things, but there are some memories too pure for even the ravages of the years, and that Sunday is as fresh in my mind as it was when I woke the next morning.
Hatred was like some otherworldly beast, seeded in small acts of violence and oppression against our Jewish citizens, growing in strength as the power-hungry fed it with rhetoric and propaganda.
Most people have no idea what prolonged terror really feels like. I certainly didn’t until that day. In that terrifying darkness, I sweated through hours and hours and hours of being certain that any second, a bomb would fall on us—that any second, the cellar would cave in—that any second, a man with a gun would appear in the doorway to take away my life.
To destabilize a group of people is not at all difficult, not if you are willing to be cruel enough. You simply knock out the foundations, and a natural consequence is that the rest begins to tumble. The Nazis knew this—and that’s why one of their very first tactics in Poland was to execute or imprison those likely to lead in any uprising against them.
I needed my hopes to mark me and for my dreams to become a part of my body, something tangible that could not be lost or taken.
Hatred spreads—it doesn’t burn out with time. Someone needs to stand up and stop it.
Life has a way of reminding you that you are at the mercy of chance, and that even well-thought-out plans can turn to chaos in an instant.
Even in the worst of times, life takes on a rhythm and the days blur into one another.
Almost overnight, it was as if my brothers had never existed at all. It was one thing for the Nazis to have the power of life or death over us, but this preternatural ability to entirely erase two young men who had meant so much to us? Just like that, my parents had gone from a family of four children to a family of two daughters.
Trzebinia Ul. S´wie˛tojan´ska 4, Trzebinia Ul. Polerechka 9B, Trzebinia Ul. Dworczyk 38, Trzebinia Alina Dziak Emilia Slaska Mateusz and Truda Rabinek Saul Eva Tikva Weiss Prosze˛ zrozum. Tomasz.
Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without explanation. But when there’s love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic.
Our family life is never going to be easy, but that can’t stop any one of us from reaching for our dreams. It cost our ancestors too damned much for us to have this life—the best thing we can do to honor them is to live it to its fullest.
