Gratitude Monday: Yom HaShoah

As I mentioned yesterday, today marks Yom HaShoah, the commemoration of those lives lost in their millions during the Holocaust. At 1000 today, sirens throughout Israel wail, and the entire country comes to a halt for two minutes of silence. People stop driving, shopping, lecturing, giving closing arguments, preparing lunch, playing soccer. Indoors or out, they stop in their tracks (if they’re in cars, they get out and stand beside them) and spend two minutes thinking about a time when the unthinkable became not only thinkable but executable.

Two minutes, six million dead; that’s about 50,000 lives per second.

And I’m guessing that the primary purpose of those sirens is not Yom HaShoah; it’s to warn of present-day dangers to the survival of both Israel and the Jews. Which lends another layer of meaning to the custom.

So, today also being Gratitude Monday, what’s there to be grateful about in all this?

Well, I’m grateful that—with all the will in the world, and a good deal of the technologies at their disposal—the Nazis did not succeed in eradicating European Jewry. I’m really not very good with large numbers; I think in terms of each life—who that man was; what that child might have become; how that woman was going to work in a factory, be a research chemist, plant a garden. Each of those possibilities gone.

But not all of the potential was lost—for example, David Keller, who survived Nazi slave labor camps to come to the United States, raise a family, volunteer in the community and die a couple of years ago in Palo Alto, aged 89.

I’m grateful for the life of David Keller, and for the millions of men and women of the Allied armies, navies and air forces who beat the Germans back yard by yard to enable Keller and thousands of others to live out their lives.

I’m grateful for one of the most unlikely of Presidents, that failed haberdasher and product of machine politics from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, who (unlike FDR) felt that creating a homeland in the Middle East for the surviving Jews was both a morally and geopolitically correct stance. His recognition of the State of Israel in 1948—in the face of objections from his military and diplomatic advisors, not to mention the international opposition, starting with Britain—was probably the tipping point for getting that fledgling nation any kind of start at all.

I’m grateful that people like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi did not flinch in recounting their experiences with the Final Solution. And that Victor Frankl used his experience to help us understand that the strength of our mental lives gives strength to our physical ones.

Remembrance of this past is crucial to our future, if we are not to replicate it. Because, as Anatoly Kuznetsov said, "Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today."