2019 WFJCSH&D Conference Vancouver, November 1-4 Robert Krell Keynote

The Future of Our Past: Informing and Inspiring the Next Generations

Keynote for 31st Gathering of WFJCSH&D

Vancouver, B.C. Canada       November 2, 2019

Dear friends,

Look around you. Embrace what you see. Already you are sharing a miracle. For how is it possible that we are here? Think of it. We were not meant to be. Survivors are exactly that. Survivors. And if not for them, obviously there would be no children or grandchildren, which is precisely what our enemies had in mind. The genocidal objective was our elimination. The total destruction of European Jewry, followed by the annihilation of Jews in whatever lands subsequently captured and occupied by Nazi Germany.

But here we are, gathered in this room, raising the question as to what brings us here and to what purpose? After all, we lead our lives individually, as best we can. Not as a group. What in the world do we have in common, that impacts our lives, that informs who we are and perhaps, what we do? Are we even aware of what we share, whether consciously or unconsciously? These are complex issues. Let me share what happened when a few local therapists who each had at least one Holocaust survivor parent, approached me some thirty years ago to ask if I would lead a seminar to better prepare them for clients who sought their help and who were second generation sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. I formed a small group of about six individuals, psychologists and social workers by training, and planned to meet several times.

To my surprise, they began with a challenge, to prove to them that they were themselves in some important way different from children of prewar Canadian Jews. So I asked them if they could think of anything. I was surprised again. They could not. I suggested they describe dinner at home in childhood. Were they told to eat everything on their plate? Well, of course. But so were all Jewish children and millions of Canadian kids. “Sure”, I said, “but which of you were told to eat everything on your plate because ‘when I was in Auschwitz there was nothing to eat’. I also asked if anyone had experienced a parent screaming at night with nightmares. 3 or 4 hands were raised. “What did you do?” They went to comfort their distraught parent. How many Canadian Jewish children of non-survivor families were called upon in this manner? Parenting was often  reversed and all my therapist-students had in childhood, responde with some form of care to alleviate parental suffering. Then they entered the helping professions as adults.

In a 2019 book titled, “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Ellie Wiesel”, Howard Reich, a second generation son of survivors born in the 1950’s writes “Born after the war, I endure its effects. The children of survivors are almost as traumatized as the survivors themselves. I suffer from an Event I have not even experienced.” He reflects, “I wondered how my parents and the others endured. Where did they find the strength to start over? How did they cope with the overwhelming destruction of their families, friends, and shtetl? Why did almost no one help them? How was it possible to believe in God after the Holocaust? Or during? Why did the survivors have children? Why didn’t the world want to hear the survivors’ stories after the war? And Reich raises other questions, including “What did we lose by not having grandparents? How do we manage being involuntary inheritors of tragedy, grief, and heroism? How has the legacy affected us? How should we speak of the Holocaust today? What is our responsibility?”

I am myself a Holocaust survivor, having been hidden between ages 2 and 5 with a Christian family in The Hague, Holland. But because I had the good fortune that my parents survived separately in hiding, I was returned to them. At that moment I became also second generation and behaved as a child of survivors. I did everything I could to comfort them. They had lost their parents, brothers and sisters. I was not yet aware of my losses. I could not, as a six year old conceptualize what it meant to have grandparents, aunts and uncles, a complete family. Is that perhaps why today I try to be the grandfather I would have wanted?   But my parents had lost everyone. In 1945 they had only me and one nephew, my first cousin, son of my father’s sister, Mania, who was murdered in Sobibor. My brother was born 16 years later in Canada.

So for 16 years I was an only child whose responsibility was not to add to the grief/sorrow/tsures of my struggling parents. Hence I was compliant, studied hard, kept illness to myself, played piano and practiced so as not to waste their money, expressed no fears even when scared to death, ate what I was given and made no demands. Twenty years later, after completing my psychiatry residency in the United States, I returned to Vancouver despite attractive offers in the US but I felt obliged to return home to be near them. Which I did. Then I looked after them as they aged. My father required much support and care for about 10 years until he passed at age 82. When my father languished in the Jewish home for the aged and I visited, he would point to a caretaker he loved andwho had been a family friend and whisper, “Rob, watch out for her. She is S.S.”

Please note also that for a young child survivor with parents, or a second generation child born in the 40’s and 50’s, the death of a parent is not infrequently the first death experienced personally. Without grandparents, aunts and uncles to lose and mourn, it is the fate of we children of survivors to live immersed in stories and memories of multiple, gruesome deaths, yet not encounter death personally until age 50 or 60. When my father died, I was 55. When my mother died, I was 67.

I lived my early postwar llife primarily as a second generation person, and buried my childhood survival as secondary in the story of survival until I realized my more authentic existence as a first generation survivor. One day in Jerusalem, at the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1981, everything changed for me. When one makes a momentous self-discovery, it can be a life-changing experience. I discovered the existence of child Holocaust survivors.

I had come to Jerusalem that year for many reasons, not only for the Gathering. The primary reason was to honour my rescuers, Albert, Violette and Nora Munnik, all of whom had been inscribed among the righteous at Yad Vashem. My dear “Vader” had passed away. But Moeder and Nora, my wartime sister, were with me in 1981 to plant a tree and to be recognized at a ceremony in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance. My parents, Leo and Emmy Krell, were there, as was my younger brother, accompanied by his wife. At one point during the ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance, I looked up during the chanting of El Malei Rachamim and through my tears saw Moeder at my side and my mother standing at the railing opposite. Two mothers – one who gave me into hiding to save my life, the other who accepted me, and thereby did save my life.

One of the opening speeches at the Gathering caught my attention. I heard, “My name is Israel Meir Lau, and I am the Chief Rabbi of Netanya. My father, the Rabbi of Piotrowsk was murdered at Treblinka, my mother died of hunger at Ravensbrück. I was the youngest survivor of Buchenwald. I was eight years old.”

It was as if lightning had struck. Rabbi Lau was eight-year old Lulek at liberation! In 1945 my first cousin Nallie was six, my second cousin Milly eight, and I was five. We were the children who had survived the Holocaust, child survivors of the Shoah. So that is what I discovered. And of course, it is likely that other children somewhere had made a similar discovery but I had not heard of them nor seen any identify themselves as child Holocaust survivors.

I was aware of the adult survivors. They were rooted in their identity as Holocaust survivors and of course had been the dynamic force behind the 1981 World Gathering in Jerusalem, including such leaders as Ben and Vladka Meed, Ernest Michel and Eli Zborowski amongst others.

And the Second Generation had announced itself with conferences and gatherings in the late 1970’s which also saw the publication of Helen Epstein’s ground breaking book Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with the Sons and Daughters of Survivors. Therefore, the adult survivors had found an identity, as had the Second Generation.

But where were we, the children? Most of us had been in hiding. Very few little ones survived concentration camps making Rabbi Lau, at age eight, a very rare exception. Of the 1,000 children found at Buchenwald, most were adolescents aged twelve or thirteen and older.

At Écouis, where 426 of the children were taken by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants French Rescue Society, the staff had prepared little beds but they received no little ones.

And these children sent there for their recovery were told many things, some insulting and derogatory. Apparently a psychiatrist or psychologist told the gathered assembly of children that they would never recover and by other doctors that they might not live long, and by officials that they were probably sociopaths. (Who but sociopaths could possibly have survived? Or so they thought). I have been told this by several boys who were there.

But they were also instructed despite the various dire and ominous predictions, to leave the past behind and get on with the future. Fortunately, they had some wonderful and optimistic social workers like Judith Hemmendinger and her assistant Niny Cohen, and teachers like Manfred Reingwitz who tamed them, nurtured them, and salvaged most of them. These camp children included Elie Wiesel (1986 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), Israel Meir Lau (Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel) and Naphtali Lau-Lavie (Israel’s Consul General to New York) and our own Robbie Waisman.

What had happened to children saved in hiding? I know of some early interviews of children in the post-war years. Indeed, there were photos in LIFE magazine of some who arrived to America. Forty-eight such children arrived to Vancouver, Canada as early as 1947. That is when Mariette Doduck, my co-chair of this gathering, arrived.

What did children in Canada or the United States or Australia or in Israel do? They remained hidden. Hiding was difficult during the war, much easier after. The few who tried to talk did so at great personal risk. They did not really wish to reveal themselves as different; as having coped with monstrous experiences, enormous losses, and monumental insecurity. We wanted to look and be normal. In any case, few adults, even mental health professionals, especially mental health professionals, did not ask about their experiences and advised them to forget the unforgettable. And worse, children were told that because of their young age, they likely had no memories and therefore did not suffer.

Somehow, mental health professionals colluded in this madness. Before the war, a single childhood trauma was viewed with great alarm and resulted in years of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy but this obvious massive psychological disaster was virtually ignored. Perhaps it was inevitable that no one knew what to do with us, how to treat us, even to face us. We had been surrounded by death. 93% of all Jewish children under Nazi domination were murdered. We are less than 1 of 10 left. What absolutely no-one recognized was that we were children who grew up over-night. In mortal danger, we had to adapt to circumstances beyond imagination. We became elderly children. Childhood was erased. Decisions had to be made, languages learned, Christianity embraced, rituals mastered. Emotions were stifled, illnesses ignored, abuses unreported. Children remade their lives to adapt to circumstances and largely it was not enough. One slip, one mistake, one failure of luck, meant betrayal and death.

And then we were cast aside – we little ones who were instructed to live as if nothing had happened. We became the children of silence. Silence became our language. And it lasted for a biblical fourty years, given that it was not until the 1980’s that the traumas of early childhood could no longer be contained. When you tried to talk about your experiences and fears, you were told to forget the past and get on with life. Unfortunately it is the past that must be recaptured and remembered in order to carve a path toward life. In order to create a future, we had to embrace the past.

A few of us did that. Frieda Grayzel in Massachusetts, Stefanie Seltzer in Pennsylvania, and I in Los Angeles with Sarah Moskovitz. Child survivor groups formed as did eventually, this gathering. A ground-breaking event was the 1991 Hidden Child/ADL Conference in New York which attracted 1600 participants, largely child survivors. It was there where in the various workshops, Child Holocaust survivors revealed their struggles to others with similar preoccupations. It was a matter of, “Thank God, I thought I was crazy. But you were crazy with the same issues. So perhaps we are normal” How true. I wrote many years ago, that if a Holocaust survivor did not suffer depressions, nightmares, insomnia, flashbacks, and unexpected bouts of sadness and crying fits, or did not react to sirens, barking dogs, explosions, or the sight on TV of fleeing refugees and destitute children, then they were abnormal. After their experiences it was not normal to be normal. For them, the psychopathology associated with PTSD was neither a psychiatric disorder nor an explanation. Whatever the symptom, it was simply a normal consequence of abnomal experiences.

As a 2 year old in hiding for 3 years, I forgot my parents and became Robbie Munnik. Even though I had thick, black, curly hair in a family of blondes, I felt at home with my family. At liberation, when my parents came for me, I did not want to go. I protested losing my parents a second time. I recall wailing, a cry of anguish. It lasted a long time, for in hiding I had not cried for three years. No, liberation did not feel liberating for a Jewish child.

I knew somehow that Nallie, Milly and I were not normal. We played as if we were. But how could we be normal? Nallie lost his family. He was an orphan. Milly, whose family narrowly escaped to Switzerland, returned to Holland to learn that her mother and father’s sisters and brothers had all been murdered, with their little children.

Death lurked everywhere. The few survivors of the 20,000 strong Jewish community of The Hague, slowly returned, many via our home in which I heard their stories, told in Yiddish and ably translated by Milly. Those stories have never left me. As elderly children who had grown up overnight, sadly, we understood too much. We have spent a lifetime trying to recapture childhood, even some of us who are now indeed growing elderly. But here is the good news, my tennis game is improving.

What happened after I discovered child Holocaust survivors through Rabbi Lau’s words in 1981? In 1982, I had the good fortune of meeting Sarah Moskovitz who was writing a book on child survivors, Love Despite Hate: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Adult Lives. She gave me a draft to read, and it was published in 1983. Sarah discussed the lives of 24 infants and children found at Terezin. They were brought to Lingfield, England for their recovery and were looked after by a social worker, Alice Goldberger. Sarah had met her in England, heard their story, and then tracked each and every one of these children about thirty-five years later, recording what had happened to them over their lifetime into the late 1970’s.

Sarah was a Professor of Developmental Psychology at Cal State, Northridge. Her interest in children connected to her experiences as a child living in an American family with relatives in France who were lost. Sarah’s parents were consumed with grief. She founded a group for child survivors to meet and heal. I attended the first meeting in Los Angeles in 1982 and she asked me to return to Los Angeles in 1983 and help to convince the fledgling group of the need to be together. There had been reluctance. On that day, several child survivors committed to working together and the Child Holocaust Survivors of Los Angeles was founded, growing to a membership of 300. Daisy Miller, a founder and activist in this group has told me it may have reached 500 at one time. The Oxnard conference held in 1990 was one of the first international meetings of child Holocaust survivors, and about a dozen of the Lingfield children attended.

Judith Kestenberg, a psychoanalyst, had been interviewing child survivors of the Holocaust and this led from her research, to therapy groups formed with the assistance of Eva Fogelman and Ira Brenner. Stephanie Seltzer, of Philadelphia, organized a meeting at Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1987. So throughout the 1980’s there were activities leading to the gatherings of children. And after 1988, we continued to meet annually in different geographic locations. We have been in various places including Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Houston, Cleveland, Toronto, Montreal, Detroit, Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam and three times in Jerusalem.

It has been a rocky road. After all, we children, those less than age 16 at liberation in 1945, were largely at the mercy of adults with respect to where we would end up in the world. The slightly older survivor, approximately age 17 and older, participated in the decision as to what to do next with their lives, whether to make Aliyah, how to reconnect with any surviving family, finding work in order to re-establish a sense of security. Young adults frequently married in the displaced persons camps and for several years these refugees had the highest birthrate in the world.

The child survivors were more or less at the mercy of those who were willing to take them into their homes and were scattered around the world, mostly in Israel, but also in Australia, Britain, Switzerland, the United States, Canada and South America.

My good fortune was that our family of three emigrated to Canada in 1951. It did not take long to see that Canada was a smorgasbord of opportunity, the opportunity to work, earn money, support myself in my studies and that, I could largely on my own forge my path to becoming a medical doctor, psychiatrist and child psychiatrist. Eventually I became a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

However, while preoccupied with my studies for an entire decade, I could not shake off the memories of the Shoah. There were simply too many reminders. For one, the Munnik family remained an integral part of our lives and Moeder and Vader attended my graduation from medical school in 1965 and my wedding to Marilyn in 1971. My sister Nora, who is alive and well at age 89, has recently been to three simchas in our family. I am very fortunate to have retained these strong connections. My Moeder had a great influence on my life even after the war. She liked to tell me that I was a child saved to help other children. Perhaps my career choices originated with her hopes and expectations. I must be one of the few Jewish boys who was told to become a doctor not by a Jewish mother, rather by a Christian one.

She was a kind woman, reserved and shy. Yet, at our wedding she spontaneously spoke to the 400 guests in Dutch, a speech which I translated. In essence she said: “I have no understanding of the Holocaust; that is the domain of historians. All I know about the Holocaust is that it must have been God’s way to give me a son.”

I met Professor Walter Kohn when I was in Santa Barbara, invited to give a lecture on Child Holocaust Survivors and participate in a plenary on Genocide. That night, at dinner with the Federation executive as well as Professor Kohn and his wife, Mara, the daughter of Roman Vishniac, (whose pre-war images comprise the book, “A Vanished World”), Walter Kohn told the story of his arrival to England. He had been rescued from Vienna on a Kindertransport shortly after the Anschluss, then sent on to Canada with hundreds of other Jewish adolescents and interned as an “enemy alien”. He applied to the UBC Department of Physics writing that he was learning English and besides, that he knew a ’little math’. He received a very harsh rejection. So he took an MA in applied mathematics at the University of Toronto, then a PhD in Physics from Harvard in 1948, went to UCal, San Diego in 1960, and became Professor of Physics at Santa Barbara and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. When I asked him as to his status as a Holocaust survivor, he modestly declined that definition. Both of his parents had been murdered and he had lost most of his family but felt he had not himself earned the designation of “survivor”.

About ten years later, when he visited Vancouver for our ”Enemy Aliens” exhibition at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center   I asked him whether he had defined his survivorhood. He thought deeply and replied, “If pressed to define myself, I think of myself as a man of special responsibility “. And now I see before me not necessarily a clearly defined generational sequence so much as a group of people impacted by this massive catastrophe whom have been handed a responsibility.

Because of my self-discovery as a child Holocaust survivor, I felt an obligation. I am a person with a special responsibility. As a result I have been to the vast majority of these Gatherings, often serving as a keynote speaker in order to kick off the conference that I know will be filled with workshops and deliberations that are meaningful to yourselves and to your sons and daughters and grandchildren. That has been a special privilege in my life. I have also written about what makes us unique and want to mention just a couple of themes briefly for your consideration.

One theme we share is memory. Depending on our age, it is a memory of fragments and pieces. Very few of us possess a continuing narrative within our minds as to our precise experiences. I know that it has been helpful for some to put those pieces into a chronologic timeline for that not only strengthens memory but it strengthens personal identity. For some, that is a lifelong struggle. I was reminded of the effects of a fragmented memory when I delivered a Kristallnacht commemorative address some years ago here in Vancouver. I seldom speak so publicly to our own community. I usually go to schools. This time, my family was in the front row and our three daughters were crying. After the talk, I asked them why. After all they know my history, met my Dutch Christian family, especially my sister Nora and they knew of my involvement and commitment to the Jewish community and to Shoah education. But for this event, I told my story in sequence. They said, “We have only heard fragments and pieces of your life. But you never shared the experiences in its entirety. This was the first time that we understood the impact on your life and some of that impact on us.” So for those of you who have not done so and still can, share your story, as completely as you are able to.

A related problem was the inability of Holocaust survivors to find the right time, the right words, to tell their children. Generally, the survivors wanted to protect their children from their memories as much or more, as the children wanted to protect their parents from the pain of memory. So it was hard for the first generation to speak with the second generation, for those conversations were so frequently aborted. The second generation learned not to ask. How astonishing for them to see their children, the third generation grandchildren innocently pose similar questions and elicit a welcoming response. “Zaideh, Bubby, I am doing a project for school on our family and I have some questions about what happened during the war.”

I have heard many complaints from second generation who have no knowledge of their family’s past, and I urged them to send their children as emissaries, ‘schlichim’ on a mission of fact finding. They return with names, places of origin, descriptions of life (and of death), stories of defeat and loss, and of courage and heroism. They are enriched forever by knowing, for they are alive because their grandparents, against all odds, made it.

Another major and contentious issue has been the pursuit of faith and spirituality. After all, we were persecuted for being Jews, often not knowing what it was to be a Jew. In fact, some of us had no Jewish education to rely on for our identity and in any case were forbidden to mention it in order to survive. The road back to securing a firm foundation based on Jewish tradition and Jewish identity has been for many a life long struggle.

Upon arrival in Canada in 1951, my father did take me to synagogue but only to tell me that he did so because his father had taken him to synagogue but that I should have no expectation of seeing him pray, ever. And he did not.

I found my way back to Judaism through having joined Habonim, an organization that helped me to develop my attachment to Israel and to find my first Jewish friends, friendships that have lasted for a lifetime. My way back to Judaism was a complicated and slow process. But I have tried and try a little more each year. Marilyn and I are the lucky parents of three daughters, who have all committed to their Judaism and married within the faith. We have nine grandchildren, all of whom have attended Jewish day schools.

Confronted with adversity after survival, and finding the strength to cope with life’s complexities, we have somehow reached this stage. What now? What do we do as aging child Holocaust survivors who must derive from our complicated lives, the necessary guidelines for our children and grandchildren? Perhaps just a few messages.

Do not forget what Israel means to us. Never assume that all is self-evident. Share with them how we regained pride in being Jewish and how much the State of Israel contributed to that pride. We were once children who were hunted for being Jews, a condition over which we had no choice but for which we were shamed and persecuted. Remind your children and grandchildren that without Israel, their opportunities for success will again be limited. Israel provides the antidote to being and feeling powerless. We are the sum total of our experiences and given the richness of those experiences, our observations must be provided to succeeding generations. That is our responsibility. We cannot stand aside and assume that they will learn from our silence. Silence served us at one point, but since our emergence, we must share that which we know, and that which we feel so passionately. And what precisely is it that we must try to transmit?

At least this. We cannot afford to grow complacent. Complacency is a greater danger to us than the actions of our enemies. Holocaust education is a necessity, not merely an option. It is dangerous when professionals and politicians are unaware of what happened, what became possible when the best legal system to that time was perverted into laws of discrimination and prejudice and when the medical system envied by the world, became an instrument of murder. After the Shoah, nothing can be viewed in the same light as before. Architects designed, engineers constructed, and slave labour was used to build factories of death. There must not be a School of Theology, or Department of Philosphy, that ignores the complicity of the church or the involvement of philosophers. The Shoah was a wound inflicted on us that holds meaning for everyone afflicted with the scourge of racism and prejudice.

A dear friend, Professor Tsung-yi Lin, a psychiatrist who had been the head of psychiatry in Taiwan and then came to UBC as my colleague, told me that all one needed to get through life, was one friend and one teacher. Chinese culture of thousands of years made me assume that we too would have noted this. So I asked our Rabbi who said, “Of course. In Pirkei Avot (the sayings of the fathers) it states: “Find yourself a friend and a teacher”. It was my good fortune to have several great friends and several great teachers. One was Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald who in 1986 was awarded the Nobel Peace prize and with whom I spent nearly two days on my own on his invitation when he was in Vancouver in 1978. I talked with him and heard him speak and noted his manner, his mastery of silence, and of listening.

I had his book, “Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters”. He inscribed it, “For Marilyn and Rob – Souls on Fire”, with affection, November 7, 1978. It was true. He confirmed for me that indeed my soul was on fire. My motivation was burnt into me from all I had learned and heard. How should we do the same with you-inspire you-but with less pain? How shall we provide you with the will to remember and transmit our stories and teach new generations of what we know is possible when evil reigns?

How can we teach as Elie did, that when he fought for the release of Soviet Jews, or went to Sarajevo as an emissary for peace, or to Cambodia out of concern for the victims of genocide, that he made the point of stating, “I am here as a Jew”. He did not say he was there as a humanist or human rights activist. That is a given within Judaism. To be a Jew carries with it the responsibility to act as he did.

And what resonated particularly, was Elie’s statement, “People will do wonderful things if you tell the right stories”.

So l will conclude with a story, a Canadian story that involves young people.

On September 26, 2017, Canada’s National Holocaust monument was inaugurated in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, in the presence of Prime Minister Trudeau. Ten years earlier, 18 year old Laura Grosman was upset to discover that of all Allied countries, Canada had no such monument dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust. She lobbied members of parliament and a private member’s bill was introduced in 2007. Very few are voted on. There was a change of government. The bill was dropped.

It was re-introduced by a young MP from Alberta, the honourable Tim Uppal, a turban-wearing Sikh who shepherded it along in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, a great friend of Israel and of Canada’s Jewish community. On May 24, 2011 the bill was signed. Only 4 of 448 bills introduced were passed.

Now the story behind the story.

When Tim Uppal visited our Vancouver Holocaust Education Center and announced that the monument would be built, he shared that the Shoah was familiar to him. He understood. How? His wife Kivan, who is also Sikh, had joined a Jewish friend on the March of the Living when she was a teen-ager. She retained a strong connection to a Rabbi on the march, and calls him “her Rabbi”. Therefore, the honourable Tim Uppal and his wife were educated as to the meaning of the Shoah. They knew what to do to help protect Canadians from racism.

It was young people, a next generation who were largely responsible for this massive accomplishment. From the sky one sees an enormous Magen David, with each triangle representing different program areas, surrounding a central gathering place that can hold up to 1000 people. A stair of hope rises to another area from which one can see the Parliament Buildings and acknowledges the Canadian survivors who have contributed so much to Canada in their important role in exposing the dangers of state sponsored genocide. The monument is located near the War Musem and only one mile from Paliament Hill. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind, a child of Holocaust survivors. It was young people who were responsible for this massive accomplishment.

We can never really know whose lives we touch with our stories, but they must be told by us so long as we have the strength to tell. Then it falls to our descendants. Our responsibility will be yours. That is our legacy to you.