Little Gavriella Remembered

In all the agony of the day, I haven't had a chance to tell you about Gavriella. I post her picture twice a year...one on the day you are supposed to remember her; and one on the day that we here in Israel mourn her loss.

She was 11 years old when the Nazis came and took her, her parents and sisters and brothers away. Her older brother Binyamin was already rounded up with his new wife.

Gavriella and her parents, her brother Chaim Eliezer, her grandparents and all her aunts and all but one uncle were murdered by the Nazis.

When Gavriella arrived at Auschwitz, her mother saw that the monsters were separating the young and the strong from the older, the youngest, the weak. She pushed Gavriella to stand with her older sisters. Two beautiful young women in their late teens.

But Gavriella was only 11 and she was scared. She wanted her mother...her mother pushed her away, pushed her, begged her to go with her sisters and finally Gavriella relented and began crossing to the other side...the side of life.

A Nazi guard, may God punish him for all eternity, stopped the child and returned her to her mother, to death.

This is what the Holocaust was about...Gavriella. An innocent child, sweet and beautiful, who never got the chance to grow, to marry, to have children and grandchildren. She never got the chance to dance at her wedding, carry a child. She never got to be...

Today, in Israel, Michal Gavriella is 12...she carried Gavriella's name...she is the child of a father named for her brother - Binyamin Elimelech. Her sister is named for one of her brothers. Two uncles are named for her brother and cousin. Our Michali is surrounded with love and light and lives in a land Gavriella never dreamed of seeing.

And it is that land and the soldiers of Israel...soldiers like her father and uncles...that protect the Gavriellas of our world today.

Today is Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day and we in Israel sit quietly and watch as antisemitism flourishes again in Europe. I look at the mountains of Judea that surround my home and I wish there was a way to bring Gavriella home...but there's nothing to bring her home...nothing left but the ashes of millions of Jews.

And once a year, when Europe wipes the dust of its conscience and pretends to remember, we look in wonder at their ignorance.

Little Gavriella...your eyes haunt me...