A Letter to My Daughter Marching from the Ashes of Europe to the Hope of Israel |
I am so immensely proud of you, as is your mom who articulated so many beautiful truths in her own letter to you. I agree with all of it, and all of it of course resonates with who you are as a person and the meaning of your taking this trip.
From my side, I would also like to also emphasize a different angle, which I am certain you have felt and which I will try to articulate in terms of what your being able to March means more broadly.
I want to point out that it is not only mom and I that are proud of you, but an entire people that is today more validated, more consoled, and more hopeful for the future because of your participation in the March of the Living.
When I say an entire people, I start with the 6 million that died senselessly and innocently in the most horrific and torturous of ways. You have walked in their very footsteps and have become a witness to their tragic story.
But as you have stood witness to the 6 million victims of the Holocaust, I am certain that it has become more tangible to you that this March also commemorates our people’s modern holocaust of October 7, 2023.
Moreover, I am likewise certain that the footsteps of your March have further underscored the resilience of our people through each of our massacres throughout history. From our enslavement in ancient Egypt, to the destructions of our two temples and our expulsions from our land, to the murders of the Crusades, to the times of the Pogroms, and on to the Holocaust, and October 7, 2023. You have marched defiantly for all these victims among our people.
As you know, though I was not able to participate in the March of the Living during my time as a high school student, I was able to make my way to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1999 on my own. I will never forget that solemn and depressing day as I walked those terrible grounds. Neither will I forget the one thing that brought hope and some relief to me that day, which was the site of a large Israeli flag held by a group of Israeli kids as they were also walking the camps. It was hope that was sparked in me from deep inside. It was indeed the personification of “The Hope – HaTikva” and all that it means and stands for.
I attach a picture from that incredible and indelible day.
In that moment I had my equivalent March of the Living moment as I realized that Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Israeli flag is a unidirectional journey that can not and will not ever be broken nor reversed.
While some renditions of history try to imply that it was simply the world’s guilt that allowed us to form our own State, there is far more to the reality than that, and I know that you will never subscribe to any such simplistic view.
After the Holocaust it was our sheer will of survival that we must have our own state on our ancestral homeland. And once again it was our people’s proverbial David vs Goliath story of sheer will, the sheer will for “Never Again”, that allowed us to declare our independence and prevail in our war of independence against the far more numerous and far superior armies that rose up to attack and annihilate us in our infancy.
Well, we won that war and each and every subsequent war, as Israel rose from a desert land settled by brittle Holocaust survivors at its founding, to become a leading regional and global power in terms of our military and particularly in terms of our nuclear, science, high-tech and agricultural sectors.
And it is indeed all this that is at the culmination of that straight line, one-way journey from Auschwitz-Birkenau to the foundation of our independent State of Israel. The Holocaust did lead to the founding of the State of Israel, AND it is the State of Israel that will make sure that the Holocaust will NEVER happen again.
I lament that this year, due to the ongoing war with Iran, that the Israel part of your March of the Living has been canceled. I did promise myself long ago that I will ensure that all my children would make the March, but for circumstances beyond our control, my first child will not be able to experience her March fully as it was intended.
Though you will not be able to journey from the sorrow to the hope as many Marchers have done before you with the climax of their trip being the successive commemoration of Memorial Day and celebration of Independence day in Israel, I am grateful that you have been to Israel in the past and I’m certain that the experience of Marching through Auschwitz-Birkenau will instill in you a newer and deeper and truer significance of our beloved State which protects not only those among our people that live inside its borders, but all our people around the world with its implicit guarantee of Never Again. It feels especially important during these days when antisemitism is rising once again.
I pray that this phenomenon of rising antisemitism is temporary, and I pray that your not being able to complete your March in Israel will be the last casualty of the last war that we must ever fight against those that would rise up to destroy us.
I love you and I’m so proud that you have been able to undertake this solemn March and all that it means to our people’s past, present and future.
I wrote this letter to be handed to my daughter after her visit to several concentration camps across Poland. I share this letter to emphasize the importance of our all striving to send our children on the March of the Living to bear witness not only to the tragedy of the Holocaust, but also to experience the relief, salvation, and assurance of Never Again as is implicit in the founding of our Independent State of Israel.