What I saw in Hostages Square on Yom HaShoah

Thousands of people came to Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on the evening of Yom HaShoah to hear testimonies of tragedy: one by a Holocaust survivor, and two by parents whose boys are captives in Gaza. The first speaker, Aliza Landau, was one and a half years old when Nazis occupied Lodz. At first, she and her father, mother and brother, Melech, Ruth and Rishek Goldman, hid in the barn of a Polish farmer, and after that, things got worse.

Aliza Landau told two stories. The first was how, on the night the Polish farmer learned it was her third birthday, he went into his kitchen and came back with a birthday cake for her. Really, she said, it was just a slab of bread, but as thick as three or four slices. Aliza Landau said that for all the years she was a kindergarten teacher here in Israel, she would always tell her kids how what the farmer brought her was the best birthday cake she ever had; the kids, she said, they, thank god, could never understand how her favorite birthday cake really could just be a hunk of bread.

Aliza Landau speaking at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, Yom HaShoah, April 23, 2025 (Paulina Patimer via Bring Them Home Now)

The second story Aliza Landau told was how, not long after that, the family escaped to the forest, and when their food ran out, her mother went out to look for more and did not return. Rishek, her brother, died of starvation. One day, a German patrol captured her and Melech, her father – and there were others – and the soldiers took them to a pit they’d dug in the middle of nowhere, and shot everyone, but missed her, and after she crawled through the bodies to her father, and saw he was dead, she grabbed onto tree roots at the side of the pit and pulled herself out and into the woods. There, two Polish men found her and took her to their village, and a kind woman gave her food.

A crowd gathered to figure out what to do with this three-year-old girl. Someone suggested the old couple at the edge of the village who had never had kids themselves, and the man came in a cart and took her home.

The man’s wife was kind, “she had infinite patience,” Aliza Landau said at Hostages Square. Aliza Landau told the man and the woman about her father, the others, and the pit, and the villagers got together a team that went into the woods to look for survivors, and after some days, the man came back and said we found the pit, but we found no survivors. Still, he said, there is good news, the war for us is over, the Russians are here.

Long after she first came to live with the man and the woman in the village, they were by now her new father and mother, the man one day said to her, there is a visitor here for you, and standing at the door was Ruth Goldman, Aliza Landau’s mother, whom she had not seen for half her life. Aliza Landau was six. That day, mother and daughter left. The kind, sad Polish couple did not try to stop them and gave them provisions for the way. In 1948, mother and daughter made their way to Palestine.

As she finished talking, I saw, to my surprise, that the Holocaust stories Aliza Landau told at Hostages Square were mostly stories of the kindness of Polish strangers who saved her life. Norman Maclean once wrote that “all there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”

Once I saw that Aliza Landau’s Holocaust stories were really stories of kindness, and stories of life finding a way to go on, with the help of others, it made me see something I am not sure I would have noticed in the stories of the parents of the boys held hostage in Gaza. What I noticed was that they did not say a word in anger. I know they must feel anger. I think probably every one of the thousands of us listening to them on the evening of Yom HaShoah feels anger: at Hamas, at our government, maybe at the world.

Anat Angrest at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, Yom HaShoah, April 23, 2025 (Paulina Patimer via Bring Them Home Now)

Still, when Anat Angrest talked about her Matan, who was just 18 when he was taken captive, and is 20 now, she told how Holocaust Remembrance Day was a sacred day for him, because of the love he holds for his grandfather, her father, who was the only one in his family who survived the Holocaust, still a little kid when he came to Palestine alone. Anat Angrest said that she worries about what it must be like for her father, reliving his own traumas through his grandson’s. Anat Angrest’s heart is torn between the two generations.

Kobi Ohel, whose grandparents were both survivors and whose 24-year-old son Alon Ohel may be losing his vision in captivity in Gaza – he has shrapnel in his eye – said at Hostages Square that he heard from released hostages who saw Alon that he meditates every day, when he wakes up in the morning, and before he goes to sleep at night.

Kobi Ohel at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, Yom HaShoah, April 23, 2025 (Paulina Patimer via Bring Them Home Now)

Kobi Ohel said that Viktor Frankl wrote that what separates some of the people who survived the Holocaust from some who did not, and some of the survivors who thrived after the Holocaust from some who did not, is that the ones who thrived found meaning. Meditating, he said, is Alon’s way of finding meaning. Kobi Ohel said that what is true for Alon is true for all of us. To survive and to thrive, we need to be optimistic, and to be optimistic, we need to see the meaning in all of this. We need to leave our homes, to be with each other, to make meaning. Just, Kobi Ohel said, as we were doing that night in Hostages Square.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg once wrote, “The Jewish religion asks humanity to set its course for a world that is so totally transformed that life wins out over all of its enemies.” That is not the world that we live in today, which is a world of fathers tormented by Nazis and sons tormented by Hamas, with daughters-who-are-mothers twice tormented in between. But on Yom HaShoah at Hostages Square, we all saw clearly something that is not even visible: life asserting itself, on its long, slow way to winning out over all of its many, many enemies.