I had never seen a teenager cry at a Yom Hashoah ceremony before. I had seen survivors cry, but that could only be expected, given what they’d gone through. I had seen teenagers cry at funerals, which are unfortunately quite common in our special little country. But a teenager crying at a Yom Hashoah ceremony?
I won’t say the ceremony is a burden — I believe it is very important, because my generation needs to know what happened so many years ago lest the memories of the Holocaust be erased from the memories of our grandchildren. What I will say is that sometimes it is a little difficult for me to appreciate what happened sixty years ago. When the siren sounds, I force myself to look at the pictures that have formed in my mind based on all the lectures I have heard and all the pictures I have seen of what it was like. I force myself to think about the six million Jews, and the million-and-a-half Jewish children, and the gas chambers, and the mass graves. Then I listen to the ceremony, some parts of which touch me more than others, and then I go on with my life.
This year, I had a hunch it would be different. This was my first year in high school, my first year in the same school with eleventh graders. Many schools in Israel take their eleventh grade to Poland to see the camps, and my school’s eleventh grade had in fact been in Poland just a few weeks earlier.
The siren sounded, and this time I found it somewhat difficult to focus on the gas chambers and the mass graves. Afterward, the group of eleventh graders who had been standing up at the front of the gym began reciting the pieces they had been assigned to read. Then they began reading names and ages of some of the children killed in the Holocaust. They followed that with more stories, personal testimonies and other pieces whose purpose was to express the pain brought about by the Nazis.
One girl read a story about a little boy and she started crying in the middle. I thought to myself, “Imagine being able to cry about something that took place sixty years ago. I want to go to Poland, if that’s what I’ll get out of it.” After her, all the other girls cried while they read. Some had difficulty finishing their pieces. Soon I noticed that girls all around me were crying. Girls my age. Little ninth graders, sixty years removed from the horrors of Auschwitz. And I just sat there, taking in the tears more than the words that were being read.
After some more pieces and tears, we reached my favorite part of any ceremony: the optimistic part, the part that says, “Look at us! Look at the Jewish people! We rose up from the ashes and built our own country!”
This is the part that always reminds me that it doesn’t matter what may befall us, whether it’s the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition or slavery in Egypt or even the wave of terrorism that has engulfed us during the past three and a half years. We will survive. The girls who read these pieces were also crying. Their tears were probably still tears of sadness over what happened decades ago, but for me they symbolized tears of joy for where we are after sixty years.
Through the tears we all stood up to sing “Ani Ma’amin” and “Hatikva.” I don’t have the ability to describe how powerful that is. The Redemption is coming soon, but until then we have Hatikva — The Hope — and we can survive anything.
When we finished singing, we slowly walked out of the gym. There was an almost tangible feeling of sadness in the air; perhaps that was what was slowing us down. It was the same kind of sadness that hangs in the air every time there is a terrorist attack. But it occurred to me, as I made my way through the masses of girls on their way back to the school building, that the sadness in the aftermath of an attack usually passes after a few hours, maybe a day or two in some cases. The sadness in the aftermath of this, however, still comes back every year, even after sixty years.
It was then that I realized, so what if it comes back? Where does it come back to? The country of the Jews, that’s where. The country that rose up from the nightmare of the Holocaust. This country is built on tears. Like Bialik said, “With their death, they commanded our life.” We continue to live, not despite but because of our troubles.
Am Yisrael Chai.
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