The People of Israel Live On in Story and Song

Hana Szenes, poet turned paratrooper,
captured and killed by Nazis, 1944

When I went to my Hebrew class tonight, the instructor spoke about tomorrow being Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  

It's on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.  This year Nisan 27 falls on May 2.

On January 27 I had observed International Holocaust Remembrance Day, set up by the UN to mark the deaths of 6 million Jews and 11 million others.  I learned that European nations remember the Holocaust on various days, often related to the liberation of specific concentration camps.  

But somehow this year's Israeli day to remember martyrs and military heroes had escaped my attention until I arrived for class, and then I felt slammed in the face with memories.  

I had visited Israel for the first time this past January.  Twice I walked through Yad VaShem, Israel's holocaust museum, an emotionally taxing experience.  In the bookstore there I bought five books of survivor stories.  

Afterward I spent two months reading those survivor stories and one book centered on the diary of a girl who didn't survive, Rutka Laskier, "the Polish Anne Frank."  I had already read the survivor stories of Eva Brown and Eli Wiezel, as well as the diary of Anne Frank, of course.  

Thus I have been immersed in the poignant accounts of entire families uprooted and moved first to ghettoes, then to concentration camps, and finally to extermination camps.  (The National Socialist Party in Germany had this bizarre plan to eradicate an entire race of people.)

While parents, grandparents, and siblings were sent to the gas chamber, anyone young enough and strong enough to work in slave labor camps had a chance to save his or her life.  Others managed to evade the round-ups for transportation to camps, and still others actually escaped from camps, even from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Our normal class routine was set aside as we discussed people killed by the Nazis and ways that Israelis and others remember them now, some seventy years later. All of Israel observes a few moments of silence at 10 am, followed by the laying of a wreath at Yad VaShem.  In Poland at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, a March of the Living is held each year on this day.

Aliza Klainman, my Hebrew teacher, briefly told her own parents' stories.  Both are survivors.  Her father was in a labor camp while her mother was in Auschwitz-Birkenau.  

Then we watched Israeli Holocaust survivors, their children, and their grandchildren singing Am Yisrael Chai "The people of Israel live--Yes, I'm still alive" last year for Holocaust Remembrance Day.  A group called Koolulam brought these 600 people together for this recording.  After reading so much about the Holocaust, it's very moving to see these faces, old and young, of Jewish people who have survived.

Alive, alive, alive
Yes, I'm still alive!
This is the song which grandfather
Sang yesterday to father
And today I [sing].
I'm still alive, alive, alive
The people of Israel live
This is the song which grandfather
Sang yesterday to father
And today I [sing]!

Chai, chai, chai
Ken, ani od chai!
Ze hashir shesaba
Shar etmol l'aba -
V'hayom ani.
Ani od chai, chai, chai
Am Yisrael chai
Ze hashir shesaba
Shar etmol l'aba
V'hayom ani.

We also watched Ofra Haza, a well-known Israeli singer, perform "Eli, Eli." via YouTube.

This recording is from the Shecunat Hatikva Workshop Album "Atik Noshan" released in 1977. It is one of Ofra's best renditions of this classic song. It really talks to your neshama [soul]. The Hungarian poet and paratrooper Hana Senesh wrote this song in Hebrew in her secret diary on 1942 right before she went on a military mission to attack Germany. She was captured and executed in 1944. In Hebrew :
Eli, Eli Shelo yigamer le'olam: Hachol vehayam Rishrush shel hamayim Berak hashamayim Tefilat ha'adam. In English :
My God, My God May these things never end: The sand and the sea The rustle of the water The lightning in the sky Human prayer.