By the trip’s end, I carried a dual mission

Though I grew up as the grandson of Holocaust survivors on both sides of my family, and the son of a history teacher, the Shoah never felt deeply personal to me. It was a shadowy presence in our home, rarely discussed, and I never pressed for details.

The exception was Pesach night, when my father would recite Shefoch Chamas’cha at the Seder. He’d read a newspaper clipping about the Holocaust, recounting the unshakable emunah of the Kedoshim, and we’d sing Ani Maamin, the haunting melody composed in the cattle cars on the way to the death camps. As a child, this moment always brought me to tears; as an adult, the ritual felt more distant — until a journey to Poland upended my complacency.

When my yeshivah, Torat Shraga, where I’ve spent the last 11 years teaching, invited me to join their annual Poland trip, I hesitated. I preferred staying home with my family, and the idea of confronting the camps and mass graves unsettled me. But my parents urged me not to miss this opportunity, so I packed my warmest clothes, prepared divrei Torah, and brought my guitar, hoping to uplift my students along the way.

The trip was a whirlwind of shattered silence. At Zbylitowska Góra, I stood at the mass grave of children and sang “Daddy Dear” as a duet with my talmid, composer Tai Gerszberg, our voices trembling in the cold. In Majdanek, beside the crematoria, I sang my brother Aryeh’s “Yizkereim” — a plea for Hashem to gather the cries of those who died al kiddush Hashem. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, I delivered the first eulogy my paternal great-grandparents had ever received. I recounted the miracle of my maternal great-grandmother’s survival: an SS officer’s fleeting mercy, instructing her daughters to claim she was their sister, sparing her from Mengele’s selection.

By the trip’s end, I carried a dual mission: to remember those who perished in sanctification of Hashem’s Name — and to live in a way that glorifies His Name.