I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, barely survivors. Survivors who stepped out of the camps into a world emptied of everyone they had ever loved. Survivors who emerged with no surviving family, no parents, no siblings, no child, no spouse.

Standing in a silence so total it could scarcely be understood.

In 1945 it meant beginning again with nothing; even sweet memories were impossible to contemplate because the past itself was too painful to touch. Those who tried to look backwards found only devastation. To move forward at all required turning away from what had been ripped out. Their past had been erased, their future stolen before it could be lived. Survival did not mean restoration. It meant carrying absence forward until life could slowly be rebuilt.

The last three years, our nation has walked through a valley of tears.

Atrocities beyond imagination have been inflicted on us, and the world has given us no respite. Again and again we have watched parents bury their own children, and in those moments of unbearable grief our people have shown a heroism that defies comprehension, mothers and fathers who, at the graves of their sons and daughters, somehow turn their pain outward to strengthen our entire nation.

I could not escape the saying that there is nothing worse than burying one’s own child. And yet our nation has known worse. My beloved Bompa Baruch of blessed memory lost his daughters Rachel and Rosalia Mellinger. My Zaidi Wolf of blessed memory lost his son Yehuda Lubelski. My grandmother’s unborn son, kicked to death in her womb by a Nazi, never even received a burial. These losses were not only deaths. They were erasures.

They tried to erase our entire nation. They tried to kill our faith and everything we bring to the world. And yet we rose again. We flourished, and we carried our dead forward by naming our sons and daughters after them and by making the world a better place. But these wounds, carried across generations, have shaped the way we see ourselves and the world. We allowed the pain we carry to be dulled by illusions about what the world understands, what it remembers, and what it........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)