It is a small yellow vase. And it is the only object from Europe that I still possess.

The vase was given to my grandmother, Dora, from Dortmund, Germany, on the occasion of her engagement to my grandfather, Saul Birnberg, born in Kolomaya and raised in Hamburg, in the late 1920s. It began as a simple gift marking the start of a life together in a Europe where Jews, despite growing unease, still believed they belonged.

That belief did not last.

Like so many Jews of their time, my grandparents became what history would later call “Wandering Jews,” though there was nothing voluntary about their movement. From Dortmund, they fled to Liège, then Brussels, part of a broader pattern of German Jewish displacement in the 1930s when the beginnings of the Holocaust were percolating. With them, they carried very little. Among those few items was this small yellow vase.

The Nazi occupation of Belgium erased any illusion of refuge. My grandfather was arrested in Brussels and deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. He had been turned in by a fellow Jew, Jacques the Musser (traitor) a detail that sits uncomfortably in my family story. No one knows what Jacques was thinking as he went around Brussels with the Gestapo pointing out Jews but we do know at the end, his wife and children were murdered by the Nazis too.

The pretty vase, sitting in a place of honor in my home, reminds me daily of loss and uncomfortable truths as is so often in the case of war.

At the same time, another story was unfolding within the same family—one of concealment and rescue. My mother Sonia and her sister Hannie were hidden children in Belgium, separated from their parents, living under assumed identities. They moved through a world in which even their names were no longer their own, dependent on the vigilance and courage of others. They were ultimately protected by a headmistress, Mademoiselle Louise Anciaux later recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations—a reminder that even within a landscape of betrayal and violence, there were individuals who chose moral clarity at great personal risk.

My mother and aunt survived but carried the ramifications of their harrowing experiences with them to this day. In their nineties, they are still alive.

The trauma of separation from ones parents as children, of silence, of living as someone else in order to remain alive, did not end when the war did.

My father, who kept the name Charles he used while in hiding with his family also in Belgium, also carried those experiences into his postwar life. Unlike many survivors who did not speak of their experiences, my family spoke about them—often.

One of the defining consequences of forced migration under persecution is the near-total loss of material culture. When my great-grandparents were expelled during the 1938 Polenaktion and later deported, nothing remained of their home. I eventually found a detailed inventory of their possessions in the Münster state archives: furniture, linens, everyday objects—an entire life reduced to a bureaucratic list. But the objects themselves, taken by their neighbors and/or destroyed during Kristallnacht.

What survives, in most families like mine, is almost nothing. I always look with envy at the beautiful large silver candlesticks many of my non-Holocaust related friends inherited.

Which is why the little yellow vase matters so much to me.

After the war, my maternal grandmother’s movement with her daughters continued: to Antwerp, and a short-lived marriage to another survivor, back to Belgium and eventually to New York, another marriage and some peace and quiet. Each relocation reflected a broader Jewish trajectory of displacement and rebuilding. The vase moved with her. Frustratingly, I never got to ask her how it was that it survived throughout her hiding after my grandfather was deported and beyond.

My mother, Sonia took the vase after my grandmother’s death and several years ago I asked her if I could take it from her New York City apartment with me to Israel.

Once again, it moved.

I brought it to Israel, extending a pattern that has defined my family since the late 19th century: each generation living in a different country than the one in which their parents were born—Galicia, Germany, Belgium, the United States, and now Israel.

This trajectory is not unique. It is, in fact, deeply Jewish.

Today, as migration once again defines global reality—one of my children now lives in New York—the story of this vase resonates beyond my family. Jews are still wandering, still facing war and antisemitism, still unsure.

This vase embodies a full historical arc: prewar rootedness, forced migration, genocide, survival, and postwar reconstruction with unease still simmering beyond the surface. It passed through the hands of a woman who lost nearly everything, alongside children who survived by becoming someone else, into those of a daughter who gave voice to that past by speaking about her experiences widely, and now into mine—living in a Jewish state that did not exist when the vase was first given.

Perhaps if Israel existed in the 1930s the vase would still be in Europe.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we speak of remembrance as obligation—Never Forget. But remembrance is not only what we document or declare. It is also what we carry. Sometimes, in something as small as a yellow vase.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)