I’ve heard that song a few times, and every time I can’t help but cry. It’s sooo sad.
I had no relatives who lived through the Holocaust, but when I think like that, I always tell myself yes, I did. I may have not known them and I never will, but I feel for them as if they were my cousins, and they were…Hashem Yinkom Damam.
I remember that my parents had guests for Shabbat, on old man and his daughter, and they both had numbers on their arms…I was a little girl then, maybe eleven years old, and I kept thinking who knows what these people have seen and lived through. How much pain could a person tolerate and still survive? The people who had lived through the Holocaust are dying out now, and what will become of all their memories?
The same thing that has become of all the other memories of Jewish suffering throughout the diaspora…
“The preservation of the Jews is really one of the most signal and illustrious acts of Divine Providence…and what but a supernatural power could have preserved them in such a manner as none other nation upon earth hath been preserved. Nor is the providence of God less remarkable in the destruction of their enemies, than in their preservation….We see that the great empires, which in their turn subdued and oppressed the people of God, are all come to ruin…And if such hath been the fatal end of the enemies and oppressors of the Jews, let it serve as a warning to all those, who at any time or upon any occasion are for raising a clamor and persecution against them.”
Thomas Newton