Some of you may know that I’m a descendent of Holocaust survivors… and not just one grandparent — four of my 6 grandparents were/are survivors. *Are because my [step]-Nana survived the last 6 months of the war at Auschwitz. The rest of my grandparents have now passed away.
It feels weird to think that meeting someone who descends from survivors of a tragedy such as the Holocaust isn’t that big of a deal, because there are so many of us. At the same time, I’m sad because there are so many of us who don’t talk about it enough, or at all. And like many children or grandchildren of survivors, the Holocaust shaped our lives.
It absolutely shaped mine.
I’ve been a volunteer speaker with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas since 2019, going around to various middle schools in the Twin Cities, sharing my maternal grandmother’s story of survival of the Shoah. I tell what it was like for me, a young child in Detroit, Mich., hearing my grandparents openly talk about what life was like both in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Concentration Camps. They’d show me their false teeth (dentures) when I’d refuse to eat my vegetables, because they didn’t have nutritional food for 6 years and had to eat grass to survive the Camps.
They’d show me books of Jews in the barracks, starved, skin-covered skeletons struggling to stand up, and mass graves of murdered prisoners. They were unapologetically open about their experiences and insisted we, my sister, cousins and me, knew what happened. It was their assurance that, if they told us of the horrors, we’d be more inclined to be on alert for antisemitism or worse.
When I give my presentations to 7th and 8th graders, I share that my grandparents had entire bookshelves in their home, full of books by Jewish authors, books about Jewish history, Jews and Israel, S’farim, Chumashim, and Mein Kampf. Yes, you read that correctly – my grandfather would read Mein Kampf, almost annually though I was too young to know to ask “why”.
I tell these kids that when I was half their age, these are the books my grandparents would show me. There was absolutely no sugarcoating the Holocaust… but is there a way to sugarcoat the Holocaust, anyway? My parents also had stacks and boxes of books (when not displayed on bookshelves in our home) about Judaism, Jewish culture, history and more. And even as an adult, I never really understood the reason why they had so many books about what felt like one or two topics.
Until the aftermath of October 7th, 2023.
I, as a Jew, husband, father, lay leader, and professional, have slowly begun to understand why my grandparents and parents had these books. Since the terror attacks on 10/7, my family has begun to collect various books about our people and our land. Books written by Jewish authors, about the Holocaust, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Chumashim, finding G-d and personal prayer in difficult times, and more. Candidly, I don’t think I’ve read any of them — at least not all the way through. But we have them. They line the shelves in our bookshelf, they lay in stacks on my nightstand and in various other places around our house. We. Have. Them.
Personally, I’m not a big reader — I have the ADHD brain where I’ll read the same paragraph three times before I’ve processed the information, so I probably won’t read every book we have. But as I walked on my treadmill this morning and listened to a podcast, I looked forward at the wall where the bookshelf sits, and saw our growing collection of Jewish-based books; the new Noa Tishby book, a book by Alan Dershowitz, books by Rabbi Harold Kushner, and my late grandfather’s 80-year-old Mahzor.
Now, I think I get it. It feels almost the same to me as wearing a piece of jewelry with a Magen David, Mezuzah, Chai or Hamsa; the same as wearing a yarmulke; the same as displaying your Ketubah, seder plates, menorahs, Shabbat Candlesticks and anything else.
It’s the sense of pride. The sense of comfort. It’s the calm reminder of who we are; what we’ve been through; what we continue to face; and how we will survive. The reminder from my Bubbie whispering in my ear, “Stay strong. We had to stay strong and survive. We didn’t have a choice, you will get through this. And don’t forget to have Jewish babies.” And whether all these books are read or not, they’re there for if and when we need them.
For that moment when we feel we’ve lost hope, when the struggle seems too impossible and we just want to give up — I can open a page in one of these books and likely find a prayer or passage to help me get to tomorrow.