Grandparents and the Loss of a Sacred Vow

On this day, the Nazis came to a little town in Hungary/Czechoslovakia and took my father-in-laws parents and brothers and sister. They sent my husband's grandparents to death...on this day.

My husband is now a grandfather who adores his grandchildren but he has no model of how to interact as a grandfather, because he grew up without grandparents. All four were murdered by the Nazis. Two of them, on this day.

I have no picture to share of who they were, what they looked like. I know that my father-in-law loved his parents, but especially his mother and mourned their deaths to the last day of his life.

I loved my grandfather and to this day, I remember conversations we had, his love and his support when I chose to become religious. During those early years, my parents weren't very supportive but oh how my grandfather loved it. He too had grown up religious but was sent away at the of 19 to travel alone to a far off America. It was to save him from being forcibly drafted into the Polish army, a country which was not kind to its Jews.

For a child to grow up without grandparents is very sad. I lost one when I was a baby so never knew him and heard few stories of him. I lost my mother's mother when I was 5 but still remember small things and have one of the two teddy bears she gifted her granddaughters.

I lost my beloved grandfather when I was 16. I remember the devastation. My first real and close experience with death and oh how I wish he could have met my husband, known that I did it, I made it to Israel. Seen my sons in uniform defending our people. I lost my father's mother as an adult with four children. She got to see them, to see the life I had made.

All this was denied to my husband and to his grandparents because there was a man, a people, a nation that hated Jews enough to create a master plan to systematically murder them. A plan to go door to door and find the Jews and murder them, gas them, burn them.

Israel was born not out of hate and the Holocaust. It was born out of love, of an ancient and modern yearning. But it was also born with a sacred promise to never let another Holocaust happen. To protect Jews, no matter where they are, from a hatred that has burned for thousands of years and lives on today in the US, in Europe, in Bulgaria with the swastika painted on the wall across my from my hotel, in France and England, Denmark and beyond.

On October 7, they came and murdered grandparents, Holocaust survivors. Burned them alive. Door to door.

There are children today in Israel who will grow up, or never knew the love of grandparents because of the same hate that infested the Nazis. But today's hate includes a barbarity that even the Nazis didn't have, a glee for murder and death.

On my counter, memorial candles burn for grandparents who never got to have the joy I have every day of my life, never got to watch the children of their children laugh and run and play.

What will I do on Simchat Torah this year, who has a counter big enough to hold over 1,200 memorial candles. How will we mourn when the hatred lives on. When our promise of never again turned out to be weaker than the hatred?

For now, I'll mourn the parents of my beloved father-in-law who bought me a pretty dress to celebrate my engagement to his son, who paid for my wedding because my parents couldn't really afford much, who stood close to me, worried about me when my oldest son was circumcised.

He lost his parents in a single day and never had the joy, as I did, of handing his first grandchild to loving grandparents in awe of the miracle of a new generation.

So much the Nazis took from us on the level of peoplehood. But each theft of life comes with the cost to later generations. To grandchildren who never had the gift of grandparents. Of young men and women who lost their parents violently and too early.

May their memories be blessed and their souls ascend in the heavens and from above, may they look at their grandchildren and great grandchildren and the land we have reclaimed, a land that would have protected them, or at least tried.