No Words

 

 “No words”. 

That was the most common reaction as broadcasts flooded airways with reports about the orgiastic pogrom unfolding in southern Israel on October 7th, 2023. It was the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Shoah - the Holocaust. When the full impact of that 20th century crime, the greatest in human history, was just beginning to be felt, there were also ‘no words’ for it. In an address to his nation, then Prime Minister Winston Churchill told British listeners "We are in the presence of a crime without a name."

My parents were survivors of that ‘crime without a name’ and suffered  terribly. 

Jerusalem 1981
© David Greenfield

My father had endured five years in forced labor in various Nazi work and concentration camps, Auschwitz among them. He was liberated just days  before the war ended. 

My mother spent over two years hiding without a roof over her head in the forests of eastern Poland, now Ukraine, which surrounded her home. She was always in fear of being discovered and unsure where food for the next meal would be found.  

© David Greenfield

They bore lifelong scars, most not evident at first glance, but possessed by demons deep within their psyches.  

© David Greenfield

When Allied armies finally vanquished the Nazis in the spring of 1945, ending their quest to systematically exterminate the world’s Jews, each parent was able to step out of Europe’s ashes into the sunshine, a chilling one. They soon realized they were mere remnants of their respective large extended families.  

My father and mother were my heroes, I loved them dearly. There isn’t a day that goes by in which I don’t think about and miss them. But as much as part of my heart will always ache for them, after witnessing the savagery of October 7th and ensuing antisemitic vitriol unleashed afterward, I am happy they are not alive today. They were spared the renewed nightmares they would surely experience.  

DP Camp
Austria 1949

My own fear was I would not have been able to allay their anxieties to comfort them. 

I would have ‘no words’. 

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