Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, was always deeply personal for me. It was a day to remember my grandparents’ survival, the murder of their families, and the genocide of six million Jews and millions of other victims at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. But growing up in Australia, it also felt like a story from another time, a tragedy my grandparents had endured and survived before rebuilding their lives in what my grandfather proudly called the “lucky country.”

Today, that sense of distance has disappeared.

As a boy, I sang at Yom Hashoah commemorations in Melbourne. I attended memorial events marking the Białystok Ghetto revolt alongside my grandfather. The Holocaust was never abstract in my family. It was woven into our story.

In 2019, I travelled to Poland with my father as part of the Australian delegation to the March of the Living, the annual program that brings people from around the world to learn about the Holocaust and commemorate its victims. For years I had promised my grandparents that I would continue sharing their testimony, stories I knew intimately from childhood.

My maternal grandparents were from Białystok, about 200 kilometres northeast of Warsaw. Using maps from the 1930s, I traced where key moments of their lives had unfolded. I was even able to pinpoint the location of my grandfather’s childhood home, once situated beside the Jewish cemetery. Today, the site is covered by a public park. Nearby stood the remains of the dome of the Great Synagogue, where more than 2,000 Jews were trapped and burned alive on June 27, 1941 when the building was destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators. He also attended the school where, as a Jewish child, he was subjected to antisemitic blood libels—accusations such as the medieval myth that Jews used Christian blood to make matzah.

Before leaving Białystok to join the march, I sat alone on a bench in that park, the place where his home once stood........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)