Listen While They Can Still Tell

By Juda Honickman

I did Birthright five times.

The first time was as a participant and the other four as staff.

The bus. The hotels. The late-night parties and discussions about what it meant to be Jewish. As a staff member, I was watching other people discover Israel and what it means, which is its own kind of unique experience on top of the trip itself.

As with every trip, one of the more intense stops we made was to Yad Vashem, the National Holocaust Museum. On this one particular trip, we joined up with other groups to hear from a survivor.

We were a few hundred young Jewish adults packed into one room, representing the full cross-section of what Birthright looks like: kids from the coasts, kids from the Midwest, the ones who showed up wearing Jewish stars, and the ones who almost didn’t come at all. The unifying factor in all this was the word “Jewish.” For a lot of those kids, that word is the whole of it. Not a practice, not a community, not a set of obligations. Just a word that describes them like any other characteristic.

And then she walked in.

I won’t try to describe what she carried into that room. I’ve tried before and I can’t get it right. She was older and small of stature, and she began to tell us what happened to her in slow detail, with a kind of pain that exists outside language. You could watch it move across her face. She wasn’t recounting. She was reliving. You could feel it. Every word cost her something visible, something real, and the room, this loud restless room full of twenty-somethings, went completely silent.

I heard survivors speak before. I thought I knew what it felt like.

I didn’t.

When she finished, a young man raised his hand. He told his group earlier in the trip that he wasn’t religious, didn’t practice Judaism, and had come on Birthright more or less because it was free and his grandmother wanted him to. He asked the survivor, quietly, with what sounded like genuine bewilderment, why she keeps doing this. Why she kept coming back to rooms like this one, to tell her story when it was plainly obvious to every person sitting there how much it cost her.

We had all seen what it cost her. We could see it on her face; in the way her body tensed up and froze at different parts of her story. His question wasn’t provocative. It was honest.

She looked at him and calmly said: “I go around and tell my story, and relive the pain every single time, so that young people like you will know, if you marry a non-Jew, Hitler wins.”

The room stopped breathing.

I’ve thought about that moment many times since. What made it so shattering weren’t the words themselves, though the words were extraordinary. It was who said them and what it must have taken to get to that sentence.

This was a woman who had survived the systematic murder of her entire world, who had made a decision at some point in the years that followed to take whatever time she had left and spend it walking into rooms full of strangers, tearing herself open in front of them, paying the price of memory over and over, not to make us feel bad. Not to make us understand history. But to make us want to live a Jewish life. So we would marry Jewish. So the answer to what was done to her people would be more of her people.

She wasn’t giving a lecture. She was placing a demand and challenge to every single person in that room.

I’ve done five of these trips. I stood in that room as someone who had already heard survivors speak, who thought he understood what this “day-trip” was supposed to mean. And her words stopped me cold.

According to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, fewer than 200,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors remain alive today. Their median age is 87. The organization projects that within six years, roughly half will be gone.

She may already be gone. I don’t know. I don’t remember her name.

What I know is this: We are living during the last years when a young Jewish person can sit in a room and hear it from someone who was actually there.

The window is closing. Not eventually, but in our lifetime.

We will be the last generation to hear the full story from a witness or a survivor. Please share their message.

She didn’t come to Yad Vashem to give a history lesson.

She came so that Hitler wouldn’t win.

The question is what we do with that now.

May the souls of the six million kedoshim be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. May their memory be a blessing and may their sacrifice never be forgotten.

And to those who are still with us, the last witnesses, the ones still walking into rooms and paying the price of memory, may Hashem grant you length of days, strength of body, and the knowledge that your suffering was not in vain.

Yehi zichram baruch. 

Juda Honickman is a writer from Woodmere who lives in Israel and is spokesperson One Israel Fund.