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My Podcast

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Table of Contents

1. Preface

2. Main Article

Preface

Pictures

Those two-dimensional squares you have on your walls, desks, albums, and phones.

Pictures that convey the past, the present, and the future.

When the war started, we had no idea what was going on.

But then the pictures came.

Pictures of atrocities and horror.

Pictures of the present.

After a few days, they were replaced by pictures from the past.

Pictures of the dead and the missing.

Pictures of smiling, joyful people.

Happy people. People who don't know that the doors of hell are about to open.

These joyful images from the past are the pictures that I can't stop thinking of.

They constantly show in my mind.

Watching my children, I see the faces of the joyful children who are now gone. The murdered, the missing, the abducted.

And one particular image keeps coming back to my mind.

In that picture, there's a family of four: a mother, a father, and 10-month-old twins.

The parents look so happy.

The twins' faces are blurred for privacy.

The parents were murdered.

The twins are now orphans.

I often think about them, picturing the twins getting older.

In my mind, I see them grown up.

They are looking at that picture, which is now on their wall. The picture of their joyful parents holding them as infants.

They never knew their parents.

What thoughts cross their minds?

Number 61.

Main Article

Pacing

I've taken countless tests in my life. And I studied so much.

How do I study?

I pace, and I read.

I study, and I walk.

As a teenager and a young student, I studied from handwritten notes. Since 2010, my iPad has been my companion. Technology has advanced, but the essence remains.

I pace and study. I walk and think.

My Parents' Home

I often studied at my parents' house, pacing and reflecting.

Occasionally, I paused to examine the pictures on their walls.

One picture always catches my eye.

It's a picture of my grandparents in their 20s, alongside my mother at age three. The time: 1940s.

But this picture never happened.

If you look closely, you'll see that it's actually two photos glued next to each other—one of my grandparents, and the other of my mother.

My grandmother passed away when my mother was just one year and eight months old.

In that picture, my three-year-old mother stands without her mother. But the two pictures glued together create a fantasy. A fantasy of my mother standing next to her mother.

Childhood after the Holocaust

I never met that grandmother.

My mother barely knew her.

My grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor (a Nazi death camp), the sole survivor of a family of eight. The Nazis murdered her mom, dad, 4 sisters and 1 brother.

She survived and gave birth to my mother.

But a year and eight months later, she passed away from an infection after giving birth to a stillborn child—something a simple antibiotic could have cured.

So, my mother, her father, and her aunt came to Israel. They were the only 3 left from that family.

My mother was three.

My grandfather sought a new mother for his daughter and remarried. My step-grandmother was also a Holocaust survivor who lost her entire family.

She was never a "step-grandma" to us; she was mom and grandma.

An extreme story.

But there were many such "extreme" stories from the Holocaust era.

Stories of the past.

Picture on the Wall

So, here I am, thinking about this picture.

My grandparents and my mother.

A moment that exists on the wall.

And I think to myself: What were they like? What did they think about when this picture was taken? How did my grandmother’s voice sound like? What did she like to do?

And then I think to myself - how lucky we are not living through the Holocaust, not being the sole survivors of families murdered.

For years, I've looked at this picture.

I whispered to myself: "never again."

Picture in My Head

But now, new images flood my mind.

The 10-month-old twins are in my thoughts, but there are many others.

Joyful images from the past.

Images that many orphans will look at as they grow up, imagining their parents' lives, voices, and interests.

Past, Present, and Future

What happened to my grandparents' generation in the past is happening to our children in the present. Our future generations suffer.

I never imagined witnessing so many stories like my family's.

Pictures that signify what could have been, but is no more.

What can we do? Merely saying "never again" is not enough.

We can't just tell our children "never again" and hope for the best.

We must teach them to seek goodness, to make others' lives better, to leave the world better than they found it, to be kind, considerate, and to be positive members of their communities.

But we must also shield them from evil.

What is evil, you ask?

Evil is doing something bad for the sake of doing something bad.

Evil is making others miserable and enjoying it.

Evil is causing others to suffer with the pure intent of making them suffer.

We must eradicate evil, or happiness will exist only in the pictures on the wall.

Epilogue

That’s it for this issue.

I hope for better days.

Shay