Yom HaShoah, begins on Wednesday evening. Its full name in Hebrew is Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah: the Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and Heroism.
The day has rightly become a significant date in the Jewish calendar, when we come together to remember the victims of the Holocaust and pay tribute to the survivors who have dedicated their lives to sharing their testimonies. The act of remembrance is powerful.
It is not only a solemn reflection on the horrors and losses of our past, but a declaration that we will continue to honour and protect that past for the sake of our future. As antisemitism rises, it takes renewed strength to stand together in remembrance and Yom HaShoah, for me, is a poignant source of this strength precisely because it urges us to contemplate acts of heroism and resistance.
I am reminded of the Bielski brothers who became partisans and took to the forests and fields. They ambushed German troops and provided refuge for Jewish people seeking safety. By the time the Red Army reached them, their group had grown to over 1,200 Jewish people including Holocaust survivor Jack Kagan BEM. Using rudimentary tools, Jack was part of a small group of prisoners who succeeded in digging a narrow 250km tunnel from a concentration camp in Eastern Europe, enabling 150 Jews to escape. He was only 14.
And, as always, I am inspired by our cherished survivors, my personal heroes, whose testimonies also tell powerful stories of resistance and heroism
I think of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – which gives Yom HaShoah its date. As the Nazis attempted to liquidate the ghetto, 700 young Jewish fighters, led by Mordecai Anielewicz, took up arms and held off the Nazis for nearly a month. At the same time, thousands more who were not actively fighting, resisted by refusing to assemble at collection points.
Although the uprising was ultimately crushed, it is believed that as many as 20,000 Warsaw Jews managed to escape and survive in hiding and the uprising itself displayed the resilience and fighting spirit of a people who were starved and subjected to unimaginable brutality. An incredible feat.
Karen Pollock of HET (Blake Ezra Photography Ltd)
Resistance was also found in the quietest of actions:
In Ravensbrück concentration camp, the largest camp solely for women, inmates resisted by preserving culture and memory.
Rebecca Teitelbaum, at great risk, stole paper and a pencil from the camp office to compile a cookbook. She noted down two recipes per page, filling 110 pages in total with the cherished recipes, and all the memories they carried, of other Jewish women in the camp.
Trading food for a needle and thread, she meticulously stitched the pages together.
In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recalls a debate about whether to fast for Yom Kippur which arose among Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz in 1944: “But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing His praises.” Starving prisoners choosing to fast on Yom Kippur in Auschwitz-Birkenau is, undeniably, an act of defiance and strength akin to heroism.
And, as always, I am inspired by our cherished survivors, my personal heroes, whose testimonies also tell powerful stories of resistance and heroism.
Eve Kugler BEM always shares how her courageous mother swept up the glass outside their shop, destroyed in the events of Kristallnacht, and who managed to secure her husband’s release from Buchenwald after this terrible night. She faced huge risks but she never diminished in the face of them.
Today, with antisemitism rife, to publicly remember Yom HaShoah or declare your Jewish identity, sometimes feels like an act of resistance.
It is these stories of heroism which continue to be a source of inspiration, urging us to affirm that we are Jewish and proud. And it is these stories that I will hold on to on Yom HaShoah and beyond.
- Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET).
