While my father z”l always spoke about our obligation as Jews in South Africa, in view of our specific history, to Act against human rights and social justice violations, I don’t remember him ever explaining the traumatic Pogrom and Holocaust experiences of his own family. I always “knew” that Holocaust survivors in the main don’t speak about their experiences, but I somehow never connected this to my grandparents and parents who were not Holocaust survivors themselves but who had direct family members who perished in the Holocaust. Parents, siblings, nephews and nieces of my grandparents who perished in the pits of Lithuania and in the concentration and death camps of the Czech Republic and Poland, including on 5/03/1943 in Sobibor. Why did my father’s father, Grandpa Victor z”l, not speak about his parents, sister – her husband and two daughters, whose lives were taken from them at Kvedarna (also known as Chweidan) in Lithuania? And why did my father not speak about, nor reflect openly about his grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins? And why, similarly, did my mother’s father and mother, my Oma z”l and Opa z”l, not speak about their parents, siblings, nephews and nieces taken from Holland never to return. My mother z”l, in her latter days, spoke about how she had to take the telephone calls and convey to the family each time further terrible news came through – but no further detail. These were some of my reflections at the powerful Holocaust Memorial in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which stands next to the memorial commemorating the 17 Puerto Rican victims, of 26 altogether, of the 1972 Lod Airport massacre.

The Memorial is at the end of a “Path of the Righteous” commemorating those who, at great risk to themselves, chose to take a moral stand and to make a difference. The last stone, entitled “Tolerance”, pleads for this memorial to be not only an “act of remembrance, but a remembrance to act”.

The most overwhelming and compelling room I have ever been into remains the small room at the Genocide Museum in Kigali, Rwanda, which covers atrocities committed by human beings upon other human beings in all six inhabited continents of the world. The awful stories and pictures remind us that no people, including of course the Jewish People, are immune from being victims, from being perpetrators nor from being bystanders.

Written by Raymond

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