A reflection on International Holocaust Remembrance Day

(March of the Living at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Credit: American Society of Yad Vashem) 

Come, Plant your gaze in me.

Make a home for yourself

In my memory. — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Forgotten”

When I was younger, I wondered about the formality of memorial days and ceremonies, as well as the press and social media that accompanied them. Today, no longer young, and after more than a decade dedicating my time to survivors’ memories and victims’ legacies,  it’s clear why these memorial days matter: Because people forget pain, and while the passage of time heals wounds, it also dulls the truth of memory. Memorial days excavate human history and force us  to confront the individual stories — the people and places, the perpetrators and the enablers known as bystanders, and most heart-wrenchingly, the survivors and victims, z”l.

It is a challenge to shine a light on the horrors of the Holocaust. The brutal facts overwhelm us, ripping holes in our hearts and leaving scars on our souls. What do we do with all that pain? How can we honor our ancestors through our memorial efforts? I offer a reflection in the form of a poem, addressed to Rabbi Heschel.

Rabbi Heschel, I have planted many gazes,

 so many, many gazes.

My sleep is not a young person’s sleep anymore.

But, really, how does that tear

in my soul

change what has passed?

 

Or does it only connect us to

tender compassion

by ripping hearts wide open,

leaving us

sated in our dutiful observance.

 

And what of those who would use observance and memory

as a tool for power, which I suppose has ever been

a trick of men and sadly  women too.

Fooling us into thinking that good is being done as a distraction

from what troubles really are all around us.

 

Rabbi, you taught us to pray in quotes

with our feet, and what I think you mean is:

Do something with this pain and memory and truth.

Meet the world in its agonies with redress.

Witness the Jew-haters, the child-harmers, the wife-beaters, the dignity robbers, the power- hungry, the greedy maimers, the justice thieves and the sadistically powerful. Hold them

to account.

 

In the name of more than the 1 1/2 million children whose gazes are largely unknown and who haunt our dreams, in the name of the child survivors who lived lifetimes with those harms and losses in their vulnerable hearts, in the name of the families whose generations were ravaged and who continue to be harmed by this legacy of fear and loss, let us be intentionally changed.

May we remember them not only with our hearts, not only several days a year, but every day as we walk through this troubled and beautiful world. With each step we take to right wrongs, to resurrect fairness, to restore dignity, may we do so in their names. Zachor B’Shem. May we include their unrealized legacies and their individual names. May we hold their gaze and their humanity in mind as we work to live lives of integrity, dignity and compassion. As we remember them and the world they knew that couldn’t save them, may we save the abandoned who live now.

In their names

Zichronom Livracha.

 

Samara Hutman is the director of Remember Us and the director and co-founder of The Righteous Conversations Project, a collaboration of artists, teens and Holocaust survivors.