The following piece was written by Genia Feigenblatt-Zwirn who has been married to her wonderful husband, David, for 62 years. She was born in Bendzin, Poland, a city very close to the German border in the regent of Obershleizien. She says that at times when she is thinking of those terrible years of her youth, she finds relief in writing about it.

“To Those Who Perished, With Faithful Love”
By Genia Feigenblatt-Zwirn written in 2007

The hour is late, the night is quiet. My eyes tell me that it is time to go to sleep. However, my brain refuses to give the order. That’s when I begin to fantasize about the what-if’s, the could-have and should-have-beens. This has happened many times since the end of World War II and our liberation from the Nazi nightmare. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20.

I conjure up all kinds of scenarios. My parents immigrated to Palestine when I was an infant, 3 months old, in 1925. They stayed there for 2 ½ years and returned to Poland. What if they would not have done so? None of us would have to have lived through Hitler’s hell.

What if I would not have hidden my parents in the bunker that fateful day, June 22, 1943? What if my parents, my little brother and me, our entire family, would have gone to the round-up when the Nazi henchman surrounded our ghetto, together? Perhaps we would have gone to the same concentration camp. Maybe someone, besides me, would have survived.

Here comes the torment the pain and the regret. No matter how many times I have tried to reason with my logic, I still cannot forgive myself for not doing something to change the course of events. Although I know that at that time I could not do a thing, nothing can make up for the loss of those precious lives. No amount of tears or the passage of time can erase the ache in my heart.

Someone once said that we are the masters of our fate…are we really?  I, for one, doubt it. For if we could make free choices in our lives, we survivors of the greatest calamity in the history of mankind surely would have chosen not to become victims. I must believe in destiny. For, if indeed we are able to choose and we made such wrong choices, how are we able to live with ourselves?

We only need to look around to see what is happening now in our world which our leaders call peace…how ironic. At any given moment, in any place in the remotest corners of our planet, people are fighting. Is it their choice to kill or be killed? There will never be an answer to this dilemma.

Throughout the ages, the romantics call for love, the idealists for equality and the human race for the most precious of all commodity’s, freedom. The right to live, the right to believe in whatever one’s persuasion is, the right to grow.
So where are those pioneers who taught us to respect the fundamental right for every human being to live in peace? Where are our sages that made us believe that it is written in our Sabbath prayer, “Days pass, years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when the lighting of your presence illuminates the darkness in which we walk.”

Where are our miracles? Will there ever be an answer? The fate of our generation will be an enigma for all eternity. It is the beginning of the New Year. May it be a year for all of us of good health, joy, and, because hope springs eternal in the human heart, peace. And let us say, Amen.