Quotes of the Day

More then a decade ago, on my way back from a year-long trip to the Far East — the kind of breaks Israeli youngsters usually take after their compulsory military service — I stopped over in Poland, where three of my grandparents were born. On my first day in Warsaw, I met an elderly Polish-Israeli couple on their first visit to Poland since the war. Unlike my grandparents, they were not lucky enough to emmigrate in the early 1930s to Israel — then Mandatory Palestine. They survived the Holocaust — he in the concentration camps, she disguised as a non-Jew, always on the run. After the war they moved to Israel, and when the gates to East Europe re-opened to Israelis, they decided to revisit their past.

Our first meeting was short and polite: a hello between Israelis bumping into each other abroad. A week later, I saw them again, in Auschwitz. They were about to go to the block where he had once lived, and invited me to join them. It was springtime, a slightly warm, cloudless, day. But as soon as we walked into Birkenau, Auschwitz's second camp, a winter's chill seemed to fall over us. The old man, a fluent Hebrew speaker, switched suddenly to Polish. He changed from a gentle, quiet, smiling and easy-going Israeli, into a somber, stiff, stranger. He started talking, very fast, and his wife translated. Here was a sign painted by a friend of his. There was the path they walked every morning to their slave labour. Here was the block in which he saw, briefly and for a last time, another friend. He did not speak of gas chambers or of the crematoriums, both only few hundred meters away, nor of the horrifying piles of shoes and hair of the victims, set silently in a block that had been turned into a museum.

He was not speaking of his memories: he was living them again. And we, not being able to reach him nor to support him, could just stand there and listen.

A year later, back in Tel Aviv, I rented a flat near the sea. Apparently, the elderly couple lived in the same neighborhood. I saw them often, walking slowly down the avenue, enjoying the sea breeze. They did not recognize me — or perhaps they preferred not to.

My visit to Auschwitz was a reminder that the Holocaust accompanies all Israelis, all the time. Each year, in the spring, we have Memorial Holocaust Day. The date, the 27th of the Jewish month Nissan, commemorates the day in which the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto begun: April 19, 1943. Each year, since early childhood, we Israelis participate in school and community memorial ceremonies, watch documentaries and listen to testimonies of survivals.

But the Holocaust lives not just in one anniversary. It's also the details of our daily lives: the tattooed number on the arm of the old lady sitting next to you on the bus, the missing relatives at family gatherings, the photos in albums, of people it's too hard for your grandfather to talk about. And, although this is sometimes difficult to admit, it's a subtext in most of our discussions about politics or about our identities as Jews and as Israelis. The memory of the Holocaust is there, always. Whatever your political opinions are, an existential anxiety lies, unsaid, in the basis of your arguments. We strictly avoid comparing any current situation to the Holocaust. There's nothing comparable to it, but every exploding bus, every anti-Semitic comment awakens this fear. Europe's Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27 — the date on which the Red Army liberated Auschwitz — is of no less importance than Israel's Holocaust memorial day — especially in these times of rising anti-semitism.

We might never understand enough about the Holocaust to be prepared for a meeting with a survivor of Auschwitz. But the least that can be done, is to commemorate this remembrance. It will always be there. As the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote: "Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light/ in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day/But then it is the light that makes you remember."

• MICHAL LEVERTOV
• Ahead of Europe's Holocaust Memorial Day, an Israeli remembers