Once, before, when it looked as if those times had passed, disappeared, been relegated to then, when there was optimism and joy in the world and when words made sense and life wasn’t upside down, then, then, I remember. I remember being young and watching my father, on the eve of Yom Kippur, at that edgy time of day before the Fast when the anticipation of the solemnity and awe of the day is beginning to get to you, I remember him going into a room on his own and reading letters the contents of which he never disclosed. We knew that they were letters from his family, the family who disappeared somewhere in that true genocide, not the imagined or made up one we read about today. The family who didn’t just ‘die in the war’ but who were murdered, barbarically, by those no less evil than those who butchered on October 7.  The family about whom we knew so much, yet really so very little.

I look back now at those days and realise I am not so much younger than my father was when he died those 41 years ago. About 10 years, which is to say, not very much at all. And the older I get, the younger he becomes, in my mind, and I wonder how I would have coped, how I would have somehow carried on, if it had been me whose........

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