How Do We Remember When Memory Fails?

Every year on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are asked—explicitly and implicitly—to do something both simple and immense: to remember. Many share an image online that reads “#We Remember.” Two words meant to hold history, grief, and resolve.

As Elie Wiesel taught, “whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness.” And as time carries us further from the Holocaust, and as fewer Holocaust survivors are able to speak firsthand, remembrance becomes not only an act of looking back, but a responsibility carried forward.

How do we remember when memory fails? What does “We Remember” mean when the people who carried testimony can no longer carry it in words?

As a psychologist, I think about memory not only as a record of facts, but as something that organizes identity and meaning. It helps us know where we come from, who we are, and what matters. Memory is also emotional and embodied—held not only in what we can recount, but in what we feel and in what we pass on through relationship and ritual.

This is why dementia is so heartbreaking. It does not simply erase details; it can disrupt the thread of a person’s story. The words that once came easily can become harder to reach. And for survivors—who carried both devastation and the extraordinary work of rebuilding—cognitive decline can create a particular vulnerability: time can collapse, the past can feel present, and the need for safety can intensify even when words are no longer available.

Elie Wiesel called memory a commandment and warned that forgetting is not neutral, because “if we forget, we are accomplices.” And yet memory is not guaranteed. The witness who once spoke can no longer find words. The keeper of the narrative may still be here, and yet the narrative becomes harder to reach.

So what happens as Holocaust survivors age and some develop dementia?

Some remain cognitively strong well into later life, and we are blessed to continue hearing their voices and learning from their testimony. Some who develop dementia return to a mother tongue, revisiting memories with startling vividness, as if the past is not past at all. And then there is the silence that is hardest to bear: when a person who spent a lifetime testifying can no longer speak.

My mother is a child survivor of the Holocaust. For years, she shared her story with audiences—especially with her students. She urged them not to be bystanders: to notice, to care, to act. She returned again and again to what survival also depended on—the moral courage of the couple who saved her, who stood up for her no matter the potential cost.

Now she can no longer tell her story in the same way. I keep returning to my mother’s favourite line from The Little Prince: “One can only see what is important with the heart; the essential things in life are invisible to the eyes.” In a season when memory changes shape, it feels like a reminder that love and dignity remain—even when language does not.

So how do we tell it for her? And what is our responsibility to remember?

This is where International Holocaust Remembrance Day’s promise—“We Remember”—must become more than a statement of personal recall. It must become collective. Because if a survivor can no longer speak, their story does not end. It becomes entrusted to the rest of us: to their children and grandchildren, to all who heard their testimony, to all who learned from it, and—because listening makes us witnesses—to all who are willing to carry it forward.

Our responsibility is to preserve and transmit the truth—accurately, tenderly, and without distortion. To protect it against denial, to keep names and places intact, and to remember not only suffering but also the choices that mattered: the helpers, the rescuers, the moments when someone refused to look away.

In an era when denial and distortion persist, the need to guard that truth becomes more urgent, not less. Time does not automatically protect memory. Commemoration must be active—renewed in schools and synagogues, in public discourse, and at home.

Jewish memory is also a vessel of beauty: values and practices carried across centuries—Shabbat tables, candles illuminating the darkness, melodies and prayers, stories and questions, humour and argument, and the stubborn insistence on life. Dor L’Dor is how we pass down meaning.

This year marks one hundred years since my paternal grandfather arrived in Canada from Poland—January 26, 1926. He found that safety did not always mean acceptance. A century later, antisemitism is rising again in frightening and destabilizing ways. Still, he built a life rooted in Jewish practice and tradition, carrying ritual and belief at home and into his work as a Jewish studies teacher, shaping generations of students with the strength of Jewish memory.

This past Shabbat, my former teacher and Holocaust survivor Irving Eisner—who devoted his life to teaching, writing, and bearing witness—left us. His voice lives on through his descendants, his students, and all those who carry forward what he taught.

And that matters here. Because when a survivor can no longer tell their story in the same way, what remains is not only what happened or what was rebuilt afterward, but also the world that came before—their family, their culture, their language, their Jewish life. The Judaism they lived. The love they gave. The moral clarity they insisted upon. Remembrance is not only about holding trauma; it is also about holding the spiritual and ethical inheritance that allowed survival to become life—and that allows Jewish life to continue.

On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I return to the words “We Remember”—and to what they ask of us. They must be carried as a promise as much as a declaration: a commitment to carry testimony forward when those who carried it can no longer do so themselves. If memory is a commandment, then it is also a communal obligation—to preserve testimony, to tell the truth without distortion, to confront denial, and to keep faith with what Holocaust survivors taught us: that to remember is also to live—fully, faithfully, and together.

If memory is a commandment, then Dor L’Dor is how we keep it—generation to generation. We carry forward the truth of what was done, and we also carry forward what our people refused to let be destroyed: our values, our rituals, our learning, and our responsibility to one another. When survivors can no longer carry their stories in words, we carry them in our voices, our families, and our choices—faithfully, lovingly, and with moral courage. We remember for them, and we remember so the world cannot forget—and so Jewish life, in all its depth and beauty, continues.