Honouring the six million

MELBOURNE’S Jewish community gathered at Robert Blackwood Hall to remember the victims of the Holocaust at the Jewish Community Council of Victoria’s (JCCV) Yom Hashoah commemoration on Wednesday last week.

In a defiant and emotional opening, the Beth Rivkah Ladies College Choir sang Hebrew song Acheinu (Our Brothers), followed by an address from JCCV president Nina Bassat. “Six million Jews; 1.5 million children; most of the Jewish population of Poland; numbers, so many numbers,” Bassat said.

“My mind refuses to understand them, my heart does not open to them. It is too vast, too remote.

“So I start to think of names, of places: Cecilia Katz in Belzec, Chaya Wargon in Treblinka, Meilech Przysuski in Auschwitz. Then I think of the names for whom I have no place … And suddenly, I can understand it, I can feel it.”

Lena Fiszman was the evening’s narrator and, as has become customary, six Holocaust survivors and members of their families lit candles on stage to commemorate the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Survivor Sarah Saaroni delivered a heart-rending account of the last time she saw her parents, who persuaded her to leave them and re-enter society as a non-Jew. She spoke of Polish “friends” who turned her over to the Nazis, and about dealing with trauma in the years after the war.

“Just imagine. Everything was crumbling around us, we were in the middle of fighting, thousands of people were losing their lives and they [Gestapo] were looking for me. And they found me,” Saaroni said of her eventual capture by the Nazis.

Jewish Aid’s Gary Samowitz talked about the responsibility of Jews to take a stand against genocide, wherever it might be taking place, and used Sudan as an example, before a rousing rendition of the partisan song and Hatikvah completed proceedings.

AJN STAFF

comments