“Time doesn’t pass over me, over us. It doesn’t erase anything, doesn’t undo it. I’m not alive. I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it.” These haunting words of Charlotte Delbo, a French survivor of Auschwitz, capture the indelible scars of the Holocaust.
Time marched on, but for the survivors, the past remained ever-present. Their lives bore the weight of history, a burden they carried not only for themselves but for all of us.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured and humbled to stand before you on this important occasion, in the presence of the entire community, its leaders, invited guests, and most of all, Holocaust survivors and their families. This year, the Yom HaShoah ceremony is held in their honour and in honour of all your family members who did not survive. We have heard some of their names read out loud at the beginning of the ceremony.
We know the numbers. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. But let us narrow this incomprehensible figure down. In Poland, over 90% of the Jewish population—3 million people—were killed. In the Netherlands, more than 100,000 Jews, approximately 75% of the community, perished. In Lithuania, 95% of its 220,000 Jews were murdered. We could keep listing, going through every European country that was conquered by the Germany, or was one of its allies.
But instead, let us narrow this number, 6 million, further down. Warsaw, once home to the largest Jewish population in Europe, saw its Jewish community almost entirely annihilated. Amsterdam lost three-quarters of its Jewish residents. Kovno, a vibrant Lithuanian city, saw over 30,000 of its Jewish inhabitants massacred.
But let us dive even deeper.
Consider the story of Yaacov Goldstein, a young boy from the small village of Gniewoszów in eastern Poland. Yaacov survived the war hidden by non-Jewish Poles in a storage nook so small he couldn’t straighten his legs. When the war ended, this 12-year-old boy discovered he was the only survivor of his family. His parents and younger brother had been killed—not only by the Germans but also by his former neighbours, non-Jewish Poles. Yakow, was 12 years old and was alone, with nothing, in the land or ruins. He was one of the 5000 Jewish children that survived the Holocaust in Poland. 5 thousand children from the population that just 6 years back numbered 3.5 million, including hundreds of thousands of children.
The Israeli poet Irit Amiel called people like Yaacov “touched by the fire, smouldered.” This phrase encapsulates the profound and lingering impact of the Holocaust on its survivors. It speaks to the way their lives, though continuing, bear the marks of unspeakable trauma and loss—not only their physical survival but also their emotional and spiritual endurance.
And for years after the Shoah not many wanted to listen to their stories. Not many recognized their pain and gave space for healing. As while in 1945 Jaacov was liberated from the fear of death, he was not liberated from the fear of life in this new, post-Holocaust world, from this “pain of freedom”, which Isaac Habib described in his poem which we also just heard [See Appendix]. It took decades for us to recognize them as heroes, living symbols of resilience and reminders of a history that must never be forgotten. In took us even more time to recognize that the pain and trauma of the Survivors, the long-lasting legacy of ultimate terror, is resonating in their children and grandchildren – new generations that came after.
The Survivors are here with us today. Their/your importance is monumental. Not just because you witnessed unimaginable evil, but because you became the custodians of truth.
In 1945, the soldiers who liberated the camps were horrified by what they found. Eighty years later, an increasing number of people question the reality of those horrors. Holocaust denial and distortion are on the rise, especially among younger generations. Survivors, simply by existing, have been a vaccine against the disease of oblivion. Your stories have shielded humanity from forgetfulness. Today, in these challenging times of anxiety, turmoil, stress, and fear we need your voice more than ever. We are currently witnessing the erosion of fundamental ideals of the modern world—striving for peace, tolerance, and democracy. Anger and hatred, antisemitism and racism seem to be spreading, leading to mass violence, terror, and war.
None of this is inevitable. All of this comes because of our – human – decisions.
And it is about the consequences of these decisions that we need to teach. Marian Turski, another survivor of Auschwitz said that Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. Auschwitz was a logic result of the decisions made by logic, in their madness, well-educated people. What happened to the Jews of Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Kovno, Jews or Paris and Rhodes Island, although occurring in different moments and places, were in fact parts of the same plan, a singular design.
The mass killing of European Jews, in its intent and scale, was for a long time unimaginable—until, through a series of decisions and events unfolding, it became a devastating reality. Until we, the non-Jewish politicians, leaders, soldiers, farmers, priests, teachers, train drivers, architects, peddlers, until we, non-Jewish neighbours, allowed for it to happen. But we must not get confused. Holocaust was not an accident, collateral damage, or a result of an impulsive decisions; it was a state-sponsored plan designed to annihilate all European Jews.
No matter where they lived, they were targeted solely because they were Jewish. The geographical scale of the killing, the number of countries and governments that collaborated, the sheer number of victims, and the technical innovations devised to facilitate the process of extermination were all unprecedented in the history of the world. This is why, 80 years later, people across the globe continue to learn about the Holocaust. Because it happened, and because in happening, it forever changed the world.
And so, it is humbling that we can be here today in the presence of the survivors. If not for you, countless victims of that tremendous crime would have been entirely forgotten. It was you that carried the names and memories of those who perished, becoming the fragile thread that connects us to a past that might otherwise have been lost. This is a gift of memory. Yours testimonies allowed us to understand the scope of the destruction, the systematic nature of the Holocaust, and the truth behind the unimaginable numbers. This is a gift of knowledge.
Finally, we must honour the survivors not just for what they endured but for how they chose to live afterward. In the face of the terrible loss, you have found the strength and courage to love and to rebuild. You gave life to the next generations, sheltering them from the past to the best of your capabilities, while desperately trying to give them a gift of a better future. This, perhaps, is your greatest legacy: the strength to move forward, the bravery to embrace life, and the determination to give humanity another chance. These were your gifts to us. What we do with these, is solely for us to decide.
Jakub Nowakowski is director of the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre
