This was originally published on LinkedIn, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2022.
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
On the right is a photo of my grandmother (“Bubby”), Olga Klein (nee Jakobovitz), holding my mother. My Bubby survived the ghetto and unspeakable horrors at two concentration camps. She lost nearly her entire family – her parents, both brothers, two sisters and all three of her nieces. After being liberated from Bergen-Belsen, she emigrated to the United States and never returned to Europe.
The photo on the left is a picture of my grandfather (“Papa”), George Klein, also a holocaust survivor. He was in forced labor, which the Nazis referred to as "work to annihilation." He never spoke about his experience. He was quiet but sweet and loving with my brother and me. Recently, we learned about what happened to him during the war from the Holocaust Memorial Center and it breaks my heart that I could not have taken his pain away.
Both my grandparents are smiling in these photos.
My Bubby was always full of love and light. You can’t see the pain in her eyes or the tattoo on her arm. “I had to find a way to go on living,” she once said. “I had to find a reason.”
To go on living – and to still have faith in humanity after all the trauma that they both suffered – is something I will marvel over for the rest of my life. She is my hero. He is, too. To endure. To carry on. To love. To find joy again in a broken world. We all deal with pain in different ways.
I realize that LinkedIn is a professional platform, but I would not exist if they hadn’t survived, and found the will to carry on. So I feel I have a duty to share this, in the hopes that people will find strength or inspiration from my grandparent's survival.
If there is one message here, it’s this: Be grateful. Take nothing for granted. Live. Be good to those around you. Be the light you want to see in the world. But above all, Never Forget.
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