A personal story this Yom Hashoah

Dimitry here. Below is a personal story, but first I want to share a word about this moment.

Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the greatest calamity to befall the Jewish people since the Roman conquest of Judea in the first century of the common era.

Six million Jews, along with countless others, perished in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Not only Jewish lives were extinguished, but Jewish life itself in much of Europe—where Jews had lived and built thriving cultures and communities over a millennium—was utterly devastated.

Yet despite the phoenix-like, meteoric rise of Jewish life and sovereignty from the ashes of the Holocaust, the aftershocks of this cataclysm left the landscape of world Jewry irrevocably changed.

In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews worldwide, and a majority of them – 9.5 million, or 57% – lived in Europe. Now, there are about 1.4 million Jews in Europe – just 10% of the world’s Jewish population, and 0.2% of Europe’s total population. Essentially, the proportion of world Jewry living in Europe today is what it was nearly a thousand years ago. 

Nearly every Ashkenazi Jewish family I know has a heart-wrenching tale from the Shoah, or has at least heard one from a close friend, neighbor, or elder. Perhaps you have a story to share as well - if so, please write back to share your family's experience of the Shoah with us. As survivor and author Elie Wiesel famously said, "When you listen to a witness, you become a witness." As the number of survivors dwindles each year, it is our sacred duty as Jews and as humans to bear witness.

However, I want to focus on another aspect of Yom HaShoah that unfortunately receives less visibility than it should - to our great detriment, especially in today's climate of rising antisemitism, fear, and uncertainty. 

In Israel, the full name of the commemoration is Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah, or Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. Our collective stories of Holocaust tragedy and trauma, now imbued in the spiritual DNA of the Jewish people, must be coupled with stories of Jewish courage, heroism, resilience, and resistance in the face of unspeakable adversity.

I want to share with you two brief examples from my own family. I do so in the hope of arousing in us all on this day a sense not only of darkness and despair, but also of deep pride, gratitude, and inspiration for the efforts of our grandparents and great-grandparents who pushed back against the tide of Jewish erasure. 

The narrative of Jews being led like sheep to the slaughter across Europe is deeply dismissive of the individual and collective efforts, even futile ones, to fight back.

The pictures below are my grandparents - my maternal grandmother Tsila Chernova and my paternal grandfather David Ekshtut (for whom I am named). Both were brave Jews who took up arms alongside their Soviet countrymen to stem the Nazi onslaught in Eastern Europe and the USSR. 

(The first picture probably belongs to 1943, after Leningrad was free. The second, with her first husband, was taken in June of 1943. They all have medals for saving Leningrad.)

Babushka Tsila spent the war years in her hometown of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, and also my birthplace).

She miraculously lived through the two-plus year Siege of Leningrad (possibly the most deadly siege in all of history, with an estimated 1.5 million dead, many of starvation), supported anti-aircraft artillery gunners stationed throughout the city, and maintained a fierce devotion to passing along Jewish identity and culture to my mother, and then to my brother and me. 

Dedushka David, from Kiev in the Ukrainian SSR, went to war and fought valiantly on the Eastern Front. He miraculously survived in a theater of combat that saw nearly 10 million Red Army soldiers killed or missing in action. Total war dead for the Soviet military climbed to roughly 30 million soldiers - 30,000,000 lives lost. How David was not one of them, I think I will never fully understand.

Both Tsila and David went on to rebuild their lives after the war. They married, worked to support their families, sung songs in Yiddish, showed their children (my parents) who they are and what it means to be a Jew.

To my great sadness, neither of them lived long enough to emigrate from the Soviet Union when my family left in 1992, condemned to live out their lives physically intact but spiritually decimated, not only by the horrors of war, but also by the spiritual holocaust of Jewish religious, cultural, and ethnic life that defined their existence as Jews in a post-war Soviet Union.

But I know that without their heroism, and that of countless other Jews—Russian Jews, American Jews, European Jews, Jews who fought in military uniforms and Jews who resisted in the striped prison uniforms of the camps, Jews who fled to the forests to wage partisan, guerilla warfare—we would only have the memory of tragedy.

Instead, these Jews have taught us an indispensable lesson sorely needed today: when confronted with the worst impulses of humanity, we must stand tall and proud for Jewish life and the Jewish way of life.

This Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah, let's rededicate ourselves to ensuring the continuity of bravery and resilience that characterized both those who lived and those who perished during the Holocaust in our own lives. In their name and in their memory, let us commit to living unapologetically, fiercely proud Jewish lives.

As Erica often reminds me, we are our ancestors' wildest dreams come true. I would like to think that Babushka Tsila and Dedushka David would be proud of me, and I hope you feel the same way about the heroes in your family on this Holocaust Memorial Day as well.