For Yom Hashoah 2026
The Presence of Absence
We live in a time of relentless information. Everything is immediate, searchable, visible. And yet, some of the most important truths resist that kind of clarity. They remain just out of reach, requiring something slower, more deliberate. Memory, perhaps, is one of them.
There are some places in the world that do not reveal themselves easily. They do not announce what happened there. They do not offer themselves up to the casual visitor. Instead, they require something of you. Imagination. Patience. A willingness to sit with what is no longer visible.
Warsaw is one of those places.
When I was a teenager, I was captivated by Mila 18 by Leon Uris. The novel tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and centres on the bunker at 18 Mila Street, believed to be the command post of the Jewish resistance. For me, it was one of the first times history felt immediate and human rather than distant and archival. Mila 18 became less an address and more a symbol of courage under impossible conditions.
Years later, I found myself in Warsaw with a group from my synagogue, searching for that place.
Except there are three Mila 18s.
Type the address into Google Maps and you are led to a modern housing estate. It is neat, functional, and entirely disconnected from the weight of the name it carries. There is also a commemorative mound marking where it was long believed the bunker stood. We gathered there. We spoke of heroism and hope. We recited prayers. Someone sang the original version of Hatikvah. In that moment, the mound felt like sacred ground.
And yet, more recently, archaeologists believe the true site lies slightly adjacent, where excavations continue.
This is the quiet disorientation of Warsaw. The city lives and breathes, rebuilt and vibrant. But beneath its pavements lies a vanished world. To visit is to engage in an act of reconstruction. You summon streets from testimony, homes from fragments, lives from memory.
What struck me most was not simply the absence of presence. It was the presence of absence.
This was a phrase taught to us by Angela, our guide and educator, across the Poland trips I was privileged to join. Alongside it sat its counterpart, the “absence of presence.” Together, they offered a way of seeing that felt essential. Because how do we comprehend the Holocaust in 2026? The scale resists language. The enormity refuses to sit comfortably within modern frames of reference.
And yet this idea offers a way in. Not only to recognise what has been lost, but to feel what remains.
In Warsaw, we searched for Mila 18 with a kind of quiet determination. Not content with approximation. Not willing to accept “somewhere around here.” There was something deeply human in that insistence. A need to locate, to stand, to know.
It made me realise how much precision matters in memory.
Six million lives cannot be remembered with the precision each one deserves. The scale overwhelms us. But in the places where we can remember, where we can name and locate and stand, perhaps precision is the least we can offer.
Memory, after all, is not only an act of recall. It is an act of care and resistance…..
And sometimes, it is a search.
(This piece was written for a Yom HaShoah event at New London Synagogue, where it was delivered as a speech).
