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by
Limor Regev
“I can no longer cry.” I whispered, half to myself, half to her. I could not give back to my mother the love she so desperately wanted from me. My emotions had died there, on the platform at Birkenau, at the moment I was left alone, solely responsible for my fate.
My younger brother was eight years old at the time of his death. Only a few hours after our train arrived at its destination he was no longer alive. I do not know if in his last moments anyone from our family was with him.
My father survived three years of grueling hard labor, risking his life every day. A single stray bullet took his life on the last day of the war.
The war had taken my grandmother, my grandfather, my little cousins, uncles and aunts… …my little brother …and my father And it had taken my belief in man and in God. It had stripped me of my childhood innocence. I had been troubled that it also had taken my ability to feel. With the tears I shed for my dead father, I came back to life.
One of the goals of the Germans in the war was to erase the personal identity of the Jews and turn them into numbers. Although they had lost the war, my father’s character and very being, as well as those of countless others, were obliterated with his death. His name is not even written on a tombstone. He left this world anonymously, one number among 1032 others, faceless and without identity.
I knew that if someone tried to harm me, this time I could defend myself and fight back.
The proud soldier I became was a balm for the soul of the boy prisoner I had been.
Many times during this period, when I was holding a weapon, the question crossed my mind: what would have happened if we had had weapons in those days, when we were helpless in the face of abuse, humiliation and slaughter. How different would our lives have been if we’d had the opportunity to defend ourselves.
The birth of my daughters was exhilarating for me. I felt that my heart, which had been shrouded in layers of suffering and pain, opened to my little daughters.
I believe that most Holocaust survivors kept silent for this reason. The desire was to protect the young souls of our families from going too deeply into what had happened to their parents.
I felt that I had managed to rise from the ashes and build a new life.
Now, from the perspective of my advanced age, it is difficult even for me to comprehend what I went through during the Holocaust, but the fact is, I am here. I rose from the ashes like all the survivors of the camps. We started families and chose life.
If only we had weapons then, they would not have been able to lead one third of the Jewish people to extermination.
The 14-and-a-half-year-old boy who exited through the camp’s gates in April 1945 entered them again at the age of ninety-one, accompanied by his warm and loving family and supported by two of his grandchildren.
