Bringing Passover back to the town where the Nazis killed our relatives
“You two should know each other.”
This was the unexpected email message I received from Andrzej Folwarczny, the founder of the NGO I had traveled with to Poland in November 2014. He was referring to a woman named Sharon whose family, like mine, was from the city of Radom. She had also traveled to Poland with the same NGO I did, Forum for Dialogue.
Two days later Sharon called me. Our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins had been murdered in Poland during the Holocaust. Her father and both my parents survived and immigrated to the United States after the war. During that first conversation we realized it was impossible to escape this legacy, although Sharon and I had each spent most of our lives trying to break free of it.
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There are few, if any, Jews living in Radom today.
No one in either of our immediate families ever returned to Poland. “Poyln iz vegn toyte yidn. Di Polishe hobn undz kimat ale umgebrakht,” my mother would say. (Poland is about dead Jews. The Poles killed almost all of us.) My mother blamed Poles and Nazis equally. Those few family members that did survive the Nazi death camps – Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau – had done so thanks to skill, hard work, trickery — and ultimately mazl (luck).
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Link to tweet
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we are watching it.
"Those who did not actively participate remained silent. What you permit, you promote." 
