Not long after the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, a stranger sent me a message on Instagram. I had never spoken to this person before.

“You dirty people. You are bombing hospitals. I hope Adolf comes back to life, because he’s the only one who can stop demons like you.” The message blamed Israel, but it was clear the anger was directed at Jews.

I blocked the sender immediately.

Later that day I showed it to my non-Jewish friend, my dance fitness teacher, someone I’ve grown close to over the years. When she read it, her eyes filled with tears.

“You are such a nice person,” she said. “How could someone write something so hateful?”

I was moved by my friend’s compassion. I could feel how much she cared about me, and I was grateful.

She knew me, and she had my back.

Watching my friend react that way made me think about my grandmother and the neighbors she wished had her back.

Hatred from strangers is frightening.Hatred from someone who knows you is something else.Betrayal.

My grandmother, Rose Silberberg, survived the Holocaust. But survival meant more than enduring ghettos and camps. It also meant living through the moment when neighbors stopped seeing Jews as part of their community.

Rose grew up in Wieluń, Poland. Hatred of Jews existed there long before the Nazis arrived. She remembered violence around Passover. Jews were accused of killing Christian children, and non-Jews used these accusations as an excuse to beat and attack them. Attacks came in waves, and her family learned to live with them.

When she was eighteen, her father died. With few options, Rose moved with some of her family from Wieluń to Łódź because they could no longer afford to stay. By the time the Nazis took control of the city, she was twenty-two.

One day she was standing in a bread line when several non-Jewish neighbors pointed her and her family out as Jews to be taken away.

Among them was the janitor from her building.

“He ate at our table,” Rose told me. “He was like part of our family.”

He had helped the family with tasks forbidden on the Sabbath.

When I asked why he did it, she simply said:

“He forgot who we were.”

I can still hear the pain in my grandmother’s voice when she said that sentence.

It took me years to understand what my grandmother meant. The danger didn’t start with gas chambers. It began much earlier, when neighbors forgot who you are.

After surviving ghettos, camps, medical experimentation, and forced displacement, Rose was liberated. She began her search for any surviving relatives.

She returned to Wieluń hoping to find family and a future. Instead she saw the past: a sign in the town square that read “Free of Jews.” She was warned by neighbors that if she or any Jews tried to return, they would be killed.

She told me she would never return to Poland. The betrayal of her neighbors had cut too deeply.

And yet she didn’t close herself off. Survival made her more careful with other people.

She wove her values into my childhood in ordinary and loving ways.

When I was sick as a child, she would rub alcohol across my skin and insist it would break my fever. She would sit at the edge of my bed, speaking in her accented English, sometimes slipping into Yiddish words that felt like secrets meant just for me. She told me her bubbe-meises, the small grandmother stories and superstitions she carried from the old world. Sometimes she would spit lightly and say “tu tu tu” to protect me against the evil eye.

Whenever I made a careless comment about someone, she would gently correct me.

“Don’t judge anyone,” she would say. “You don’t know their story.”

Only later did I understand what she was protecting.

She knew she could not control the hatred around her. What she could control was whether she would allow that hatred to shape the way she treated other people.

Through telling her story, I found the deeper purpose of Holocaust education.

After the war, Rose built a new life in America. In her words, it was the “Goldena Medina,” the golden country. She was proud to be an American.

“You could do anything in America,” she would say.

She went to night school for years to learn English. She wanted to belong in the country that gave her a future. She taught her children and grandchildren to love America as a land of opportunity.

But she also taught me something deeper.

What mattered most to her was not money, but character. She believed in treating people with dignity and being good to others.

I visit schools to share Rose’s story through 3GMiami, a program of the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach where grandchildren of survivors speak to students. Many of the students I meet have never met a Jew before, even in Miami. Sometimes I am the first Jew they have ever spoken to.

When I speak to students, I do not know what choices they will make in their own lives. I cannot control how they will treat their neighbors or the people who seem different from them.

But I hope that by sharing Rose’s story, they begin to understand what can happen when people stop seeing one another as human.

When they hear what Rose endured, they begin to understand that the victims and survivors of the Holocaust were not just numbers. They were individual human beings whose lives and communities were destroyed.

Six million is a number so vast the human mind struggles to hold it.But one woman. One voice. One life rebuilt after the war.That is a story the human mind can hold.

Once, after I told a group of high school students about the janitor who betrayed my grandmother’s family, one student nodded knowingly and said, “That’s why you can’t trust anyone. Not even your family.”

Her comment stayed with me. It missed the point entirely.

The lesson of Rose’s life was never about withdrawing from the world or trusting no one. It was about understanding that we cannot control how others behave. We can only control how we choose to treat them.

Rose understood that people might betray you. She had lived through that reality. But she refused to let betrayal shape how she treated other people.

Instead, she modeled something else. Choosing dignity and kindness anyway.

I often think about my friend at the gym who cried when she read that hateful message. Her reaction reminded me that even in difficult times, people still have the capacity to see one another’s humanity.

The person who sent that hateful message never knew me.My friend at the gym did.When my friend chose compassion in response to hate, she chose something the janitor could not.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)