They Called, Someone Answered – Reflections on Yom HaShoah

Yom HaShoah was always a difficult day. Of course, starting last year, it has hit a little differently, and harder. Everyone has their own connection to sources of pain, and unfortunately many new wounds have been opened, or reopened. Personally, I remember my trip in 12th-grade to see the camps in Poland; the horror at being forced to imagine what the Nazis did to our people, and to stand in the very place where so much of the atrocity had occurred. I never, not in a million years, thought that I would witness something similar in real-time. That was, of course, until October 7th, when I fought in the Kibbutzim, like so many others, and saw the mutilated, the burned, and the disfigured remains of the beautiful Jewish souls who had lived there.

What I feel today, and what I felt last year as well, is profound failure. Despair.
How could we have allowed a day of the Holocaust to happen in our own country, the State of Israel of all places? How could we have left our brothers and sisters so utterly defenseless for so long, at the mercy of modern-day Nazis? How were we not there to stop this from happening? Was our motto of “Never Again” simply a farce? A lie?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, and I don’t believe I ever will, but when I spoke to some friends from my unit about how I was feeling, one of them responded with a story that comforted me. He told me the following:

Some time ago, I was asked to speak to a group of Jews from the Czech Republic that were touring Israel. They were on their way to the hotel, and I was asked to speak with them about my experiences on October 7th before they got there.

So I told them our story, and I said that, you know, one of the things that is still very difficult for me is this sense that, here in the Jewish state, Jews were slaughtered like in the Holocaust. We have a Jewish army and a Jewish state, but we weren’t able to protect them the way that they were meant to be protected.

I told them that’s something that weighs on me, and is difficult for me. One of the guys came up to me afterwards and told me he was the son of a Holocaust survivor; that his father was in some small town, and the Nazis came to round them up, and his father’s entire family was killed. His father was the only survivor.

And he said to me, “You should know that when my father and his family called out for help, nobody came. But when the people in the Kibbutzim called for help, at least you guys came.”

And that’s something that meant a lot to me, that I take with me: That there were all of the terrible failures that are just impossible to exaggerate, by the army and by the government on October 7th and the time leading up to it. But ultimately, at least when Jews called for help, there were people who dropped everything and came to help. And as he told me, when his father called for help, nobody showed up.

I still don’t have my answers, and I don’t expect them any time soon. But for now, today at least, I will settle with knowing that an entire nation, our nation, refused to stand by as our people were suffering, when our people needed help. When they called out, we answered.

I wish our leaders, our fighters, and our citizens incredible strength in the times ahead.

Postscript:
Writing the words “When they called out, we answered” felt wrong to me, but I wrote them anyway. On a more literal, micro level- a lot of people on that day called out, and did not receive any answer, and that will haunt me for the rest of my life, as I know it haunts all of us. The words in my piece are meant in a more general sense: When there were Jewish people being attacked, there were people nearby that did indeed respond and fight relentlessly to rescue them, unlike the unfortunate reality of World War II, which is what the man in the story’s point was.