I remember their numbers. Eerie blue, sometimes hidden from the world under a sleeve like a shameful stain. I remember the numbers waving boldly like a flag. I remember the feel of the arm with that burnt number around my neck, my shoulders, hot and wet.

I don’t remember the grandmother, the great grandmother, the uncles the aunts the cousins, all eighty-two of them and more. I don’t remember them because I never knew them but through black and white stained pictures. All that remains are the candles on Yom Kippur more numerous than our Passover table guests. When we open the door for Elijah, I imagine that I am opening the door for them - for that generation that in its apparition is more real than are strangers.

There between Passovers and Yom Kippurs we remember collectively the audacity of man-kind to inflict death, not just carelessly but jubilantly, proudly. We look with horror at horror evoked by man-made drives, cultivated by man-made and self-serving stories that gall no one until that red hot moment when the pistol touches one’s own forehead and it fires.

Elohim She-Bashamaim “God in heavens” I ask shaking my arms at the sky. ”Why did you let it happen?”

Then I see the kind face of one Holocaust survivor who lost his first wife and his two daughters, my uncle. “God did not. Humans did.” He always answered back. Somehow this message comforts me, just a little. Because if it is with humans that we must deal with, then let’s deal with humans. Then we are on equal footing. We can be empowered if we prepare ourselves, if we look fear in the eye and mean it when we say “Never Again.”

We owe it to them.
We owe it to ourselves and our self dignity.
We owe it to our next generations.