I teach a 7th grade Holocaust class at my local Hebrew school. It is typically the first time my students have studied this topic in a classroom. As the school year unfolds, they will read stories, see videos, and hear survivor testimony that (I can only hope) will be seared into their minds forever.

But on that first night of class each year, I begin by showing my students a picture that does not reflect the worst of humanity, but rather the best of it.

It is a picture of my grandparents, Morris and Frieda Zimmerman, on their wedding day. Only three years removed from living in concentration camps, they look healthy. Left with no money or possessions upon liberation—my grandfather from Buchenwald, my grandmother from Bergen-Belsen—they are dressed to the nines. And despite having so much taken from them, they somehow are smiling and look genuinely happy.

Yom Hashoah is, appropriately, a time for somber reflection on the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate the Jewish people—atrocities that are woven into the fabric of my family’s story. My grandparents lost both of their parents and most of their........

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