The Siren has sounded.
It is Yom Hashoah. The day that we remember our six million brothers and sisters who were murdered for being Jewish. Across the country thousands of ceremonies are being held. most of them start with the siren that sounds across the country.
I’ve always found the sounding siren to be a strange dichotomy between a screaming loud sound that is inescapable and a complete and utter inner silence.
When the siren sounds everything comes to a stop. conversations, calls, work, traffic- everything. Time comes to a stop as we stand and remember.
As I stand in the loud silence and think of the huge dark inescapable hole left in our people as a result of the holocaust, a myriad of thoughts run through my mind.
• The stones at stones at the death camp of Treblinka. specifically the stone which is a memorial for the city of Bialystok in Poland. My great grandparents left the city before the Holocaust but almost all of their families where murdered.
• The concentration camps, extermination camps and killing sites that I saw on my trip to Poland in 2009
• The stories that I’ve read and heard
• The survivors that I knew who are no longer with us and those that I didn’t know.
• The same siren that a year ago sent me running for cover, is now telling me to stand still and remember
• The lessons that the world was supposed to learn and didn’t. Never again should apply to all nations and people. Why isn’t the world stopping the slaughters going on in Syria, Iraq, Rwanda and all of the other places where it is happening today.
• what does it mean for us. Does the fact that we are still here give us an additional task in life?
The siren stops.
Do I go back to reading the paper?
We remember. But what does that mean? Is it knowledge or a lesson?
Holocaust memorial day Israel 2015
Yoni Lightstone
