Resurrection of the Six Million

Towards the year’s end of 2018, seeing a Youtube film containing tens of sickening pictures of the hosts of Jewish victims of all ages of the Holocaust as they were being taken to their deaths in the crematoria of Auschwitz, Treblinka, many with the yellow star of David pinned to their clothing, tramping helplessly through the snow on horrific death marches, doomed victims of disgusting German hatred of the Jewish race less than eighty years ago, made me acutely aware of how fortunate I was to be here alive in Jerusalem on the eve of the year 2019 when I could so easily have shared the fate of those pictured were it not that my dear mother had courageously decided to leave Poland and her Warsaw home in March 1939 and join my British-Jewish Father in London a few months after he had met her while on a fact-finding tour of Poland in 1938 and had fallen in love and had brought her out and to him in London where I enjoyed a happy untroubled childhood far from the tragedy of my people in Poland, Austria, Germany and other parts of Nazi-overrun Europe.

Those pictures embodied the unfolding of the so-called Final Solution as the Nazis and their associates did their fiendish utmost to rid the world of the “Jewish curse” by exterminating six million innocent human beings of all ages whose sin was to have been born Jews. But Hitler and his rabid hordes failed in their inhuman efforts to stamp out my people’s existence from the face of the earth because from out of the unprecedented suffering and bloodshed my people experienced an amazing and thrilling resurrection of the dead that has taken place in the shape of the State of Israel, a robust, thriving, powerful, democratic, forward-looking state which is nonetheless deeply conscious of the tragic recent past and the miracle of the resurrection that it is living and has been living since the foundation of the State. The six million innocent victims of a venomous hatred had nothing to look forward to, but the six million-plus Israeli Jews of the resurrection have everything to live for and look forward to in the future.

Even in the death camps the Jews did not lose their faith in the G-d who sustained and inspired them through centuries of animosity and suffering in a tragic Diaspora exile, and today their unyielding faith had been gloriously rewarded by Hashem in the shape of their very own State of Israel almost as if the six million who perished in the death camps and crematoria have each individually, men, women and children, been resurrected and enabled to live lives of freedom, hope and happiness, in the very state which they imagined and prayed for as they went to their deaths with the Shema Israel prayer on their lips.

And now in our own wonderful state we can tell the world: “Look, see the State of Israel, the living thriving proof that you could not eliminate the Jews, try as you might down the centuries, because we Israelis are living proof of the great and miraculous resurrection of the Jewish people in their own land once more.”

The State of Israel is living proof that the Jewish People will never be wiped off the face of the earth, no matter how much cruelty and hatred they have faced and endured and how much Jew-hatred there still exists and probably will never be eradicated even though no people like the Jewish people have given and contributed so much to human development, scientific achievement and progress. There is apparently something in the Jew’s genes and heritage which gives him a “HEAD-START” over the rest of the nations and races of the world. But, sadly, it seems that however much we contribute towards improving the lot of humankind on earth so the envy and dislike of the Jew remains as strong as ever without diminishing. Nevertheless, we continue to work for the benefit of humanity in an amazing variety of ways and even more so via the State of Israel.

I dedicate these thoughts on the Jewish resurrection to the Holocaust victims as a whole as well as to the many members of my dear Mother’s family in Warsaw and other parts of Poland who perished in the Holocaust.

May their memories live forever and may they be resurrected in the miracle of the State of Israel.

Furthermore I dedicate these thoughts also to the memory of the great Holocaust Rescuer, Raoul Wallenberg, who so tragically vanished into the Gulag after his abduction by the Russians on January 17, 1945.

David Herman, Jerusalem, January 1, 2019