\t\t\tSurvivor stories, burial, music, and memory after the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust<\/p>\n
On this day in history\u2026 January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz-Birkenau, exposing to the world the full scale of Nazi Germany\u2019s program of industrialized murder. What liberation revealed was not victory in any conventional sense, but aftermath: survivors on the edge of death, the murdered without graves, and a rupture in human history that no military success could repair. In the decades since, January 27 has been marked as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a date intended to resist denial, confront moral collapse, and insist that memory itself is a form of responsibility.\n<\/p>\n
This year, remembrance did not unfold at a historical distance. In the days immediately preceding January 27, Israel confirmed the recovery and return of the remains of the last hostage taken during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. The hostage was Ran Gvili, a 24-year-old police officer killed while defending civilians during the assault. His body was taken into Gaza and held there for more than two years. With his return, the long chapter of captivity that had shaped Israeli life since October 7 came to a devastating close, not with rescue, but with burial.\n<\/p>\n
That sequence matters. The return of a body rather than a living person did not offer consolation or redemption. It offered something older and more austere: the fulfillment of a moral obligation. In Jewish tradition, kevura, proper burial, is not symbolic. It is a commandment rooted in the belief that human dignity persists even after life has been violently taken. To bury the dead is to insist that a person will not disappear into anonymity.\n<\/p>\n
Holocaust history is haunted by the absence of bodies. Millions of Jews were murdered without burial. Their remains were burned, dumped, or never identified. Families were denied even the most basic act of mourning. Survivor testimony repeatedly returns to this absence, not only the loss of life but also the erasure of death itself as a human event. The Nazi project sought not only to kill Jews but also to eliminate the conditions under which their deaths could be named or remembered.\n<\/p>\n
Against that history, the return of Gvili\u2019s body carried meaning far beyond the present war. It did not equate October 7 with the Holocaust. Rather, it underscored why Holocaust memory continues to matter. It teaches what happens when Jews vanish without trace, and why the act of bringing the dead home is itself an assertion of historical and moral continuity.\n<\/p>\n
The timing reshaped January 27. Holocaust Remembrance Day was no longer only about 1945. It became a day in which inherited memory and present trauma pressed directly against one another. The Holocaust was not being invoked as metaphor for October 7. It was being activated as moral infrastructure, an inherited language for grief, vigilance, and obligation when Jews are hunted, taken, and erased.\n<\/p>\n
It was within this charged atmosphere that I attended an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event at the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem, held in the Ed Snider Auditorium before a sold-out audience. Titled An Encounter Between Holocaust Survivors and Those Affected by the October 7 Attacks, the evening did not resemble a conventional commemoration. There were no chronological lectures and no lists of numbers. Instead, the program centered on encounter, human, intergenerational, and deliberately restrained.\n<\/p>\n
Moderated by Hila Korach, the event was organized in collaboration with the Pink Glasses Non-Profit and its \u201cPoint of View\u201d project, which provides individualized medical and support services to Holocaust survivors across Israel. That partnership was not incidental. It served as a reminder that survivorhood is not a historical category. It is a living condition carried into the present by aging bodies and unfinished needs.\n<\/p>\n
The heart of the evening unfolded through paired conversations between Holocaust survivors and those directly affected by October 7. Tommy Shecham, an Auschwitz survivor, sat with Avital Schindler, a resident of Kerem Shalom devastated by the attacks. These were not interviews. They were exchanges shaped by pauses, silences, and the shared recognition that some truths resist language.\n<\/p>\n
The evening culminated in a moment that required no explanation. Chava Nissimov, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto as a child, turned to Achiya Malul, a young man who survived the October 7 attacks, and asked if she could hug him. When he nodded, they embraced.\n<\/p>\n
Throughout their exchange, Nissimov and Malul spoke about fear, survival, the persistence of memory, and the struggle to find meaning and life\u2019s work after catastrophe. Their human moment had no framing and no narration. The gesture itself carried the weight of two catastrophes separated by eighty years and bound by a single fact: both had survived events designed to erase them.\n<\/p>\n
Holocaust scholarship has long warned against collapsing distinct histories into a single moral narrative. The Holocaust was unique in its scope, ideology, and execution. October 7 was not the Holocaust. But the stage hug showed why these histories now communicate through inheritance, not analogy. Trauma does not compete. It accumulates.\n<\/p>\n
What emerged was not comparison, but continuity. Holocaust survivors did not claim ownership over suffering. October 7 survivors did not seek validation through historical analogy. Instead, both spoke from within experiences that shattered assumptions about safety, belonging, and the moral order of the world. The conversations modeled an ethics of memory grounded not in hierarchy, but in presence.\n<\/p>\n
In the months since October 7, a new body of survivor testimony has begun to take shape. It is not yet canonized, stabilized, or complete, but it is already unmistakable in form. Similar to the early postwar years of Holocaust memory, survivors are the primary carriers of the story of October 7. It appears in personal testimony, fragmentary narratives, memoirs in progress, literature, visual art, music, and acts of public witnessing that resist closure.\n<\/p>\n
The incident was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and its memory is emerging in the same way Holocaust memory once did. It is not formed through official histories alone, but through lived accounts that insist on being heard before they are organized, interpreted, or absorbed. Survivor stories are becoming the primary archive of October 7, shaping how the event is understood morally and culturally, not only as an act of terror but also as an assault on Jewish existence itself.\n<\/p>\n
At the Museum of Tolerance event, this process was visible in real time. Trauma was translated into dialogue. Testimony was carried by voice and silence. Memory was given form through music. As Holocaust survivors once turned to writing, art, and song to articulate what ordinary language could not hold, October 7 survivors are now creating the raw materials of a history that is still unfolding, one that will define Jewish memory not only of what happened but of how it was survived.\n<\/p>\n
Music punctuated the evening as a counter-language to testimony. Alon Ahel, a released hostage abducted on October 7 and a fourth-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors, performed alongside Shlomi Shaban, himself a third-generation descendant. Their shared lineage mattered. It made visible the fact that Holocaust memory is no longer carried only by survivors and their children but by descendants now confronting new forms of rupture.\n<\/p>\n
Music has long occupied an uneasy place in Holocaust history. In the camps, it was used as a tool of degradation. In survivor memory, it often appears as a fragile means of psychic survival. In Jerusalem, it again served as a bridge between speech and silence, between grief and endurance. It did not console. It accompanied.\n<\/p>\n
Throughout the evening, the knowledge of the week\u2019s events, the return of the last hostage, hovered over everything. That knowledge shaped how January 27 was felt, not merely observed. Holocaust remembrance is often framed as a warning about where hatred can lead. This year, it also functioned as a reckoning with how close such violence still feels and how unfinished Jewish history remains.\n<\/p>\n
The return of Ran Gvili marked a national psychological threshold. For more than two years, Israeli society had lived in a suspended state, defined by the question of who might still come home alive. With his burial, that question ended. What remained was grief without ambiguity and the knowledge that history would record this moment not as survival, but as reckoning.\n<\/p>\n
This is where Holocaust memory reenters, not as a symbol, but as an instruction. The Holocaust teaches what it means when Jews disappear without graves, without names, and without witnesses. October 7 demanded that this time, everyone would bear witness. The act of burial did not undo the crime, but it drew a moral boundary the Holocaust had obliterated. Even when Jews are murdered, they are not abandoned.\n<\/p>\n
Jonathan \u201cYoni\u201d Riss, Managing Director of the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem, described the evening as an effort to create \u201ca human, intergenerational conversation about trauma, memory, meaning, and the forces of life.\u201d The phrasing was precise. There was no promise of healing or closure. There was only the insistence that meaning can still be sought without denial.\n<\/p>\n
January 27 will never again be only about 1945. Nor should it be. Holocaust remembrance has always evolved, shaped by the moral crises of each generation. The immediacy with which we now live the pairing of past and present is what\u2019s new. The Holocaust taught Jews the cost of being unheard. October 7 exposed how quickly that lesson can be ignored by the world.\n<\/p>\n
On this January 27, memory did not function as abstraction or ceremony. It functioned as an obligation: to bury the dead, to listen to the living, and to refuse erasure, whether of six million or of one.\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tBonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS, is a historian, journalist, librarian, educator, and artist. She holds a Diploma of Collegial Studies in Communications: Art, Media, and Theatre (specializing in Fine Arts and Jewish Studies) from Vanier College, a B.A. in History and Art History, and an MLIS from McGill University, with graduate study in Judaic Studies at Concordia University and Jewish Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem\u2019s Melton Centre. She has recently pursued advanced training in drawing, painting, and sculpture at Bezalel Academy of Arts and was a 2025 participant in the Studio of Her Own professional development program for artists in Israel.
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\nShe contributed to the landmark reference work History of American Presidential Elections, 1789\u20132008 (2011), edited by Gil Troy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Fred L. Israel, and authored On This Day in History\u2026: Significant Events in the American Year (2024). A former Features Editor at the History News Network, where she launched influential series such as Top Young Historians and History Doyens, Goodman has also worked as a political reporter at Examiner.com, covering U.S. politics, universities, religion, and culture.
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\nHer academic and journalistic writing bridges historical scholarship and public engagement, focusing on American political history, Jewish identity, and the intersection of education and culture. Goodman writes and teaches on topics that explore the relationship between history, collective memory, and cultural expression. Her recent research and essays have appeared in The Jerusalem Report, The Times of Israel, and History News Network. Through both her historical writing and visual art, Goodman seeks to illuminate the continuities between the Jewish past and present and to highlight how memory and creativity shape national and spiritual identity.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Survivor stories, burial, music, and memory after the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust On this day…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":268363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-268362","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}