‘You Can’t Even Wrap Your Head Around It’: Three Reflections On Holocaust Remembrance Day

Wednesday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Texas Standard spoke with three people who shared their connections to the Nazi Germany-led genocide that killed 6 million European Jews, and numerous others.

Ben Vickers, Lake City, Texas

Ben Vickers and his grandmother, Olivia.

“On my mom’s side, they’re from Lithuania and Eastern Europe. Most of my family had left, but there was a few who did stay, and who did, you know, perish in the Holocaust. There’s more of a personal connection being ethnically Jewish, in that sense.”

Michal Noy Man, Israel

Michal Noy Man with her daughter, and Noy Man’s father, Eli Ben-Ami

“I always knew that my grandma was a survivor of the Holocaust because she had the number on her arm.”

“She knew an officer, [a] German officer. He used to give her food, and eventually my grandma got pregnant with his child and my father was born. So my father is the son of a Nazi officer and a Jewish prisoner.”

“My father had a stepfather and a Jewish one who used to torture him. … He always looked for like the spiritual father of his life, until he found it in Christianity. And he died with the Bible in his hand. I was happy for him that he found peace.”

Marcia Reisman, Miami, Florida

Marcia Reisman

“I have a connection to the Holocaust through my father, who was in the Army, he was an American soldier with a company as their medic.“

“At the end of the war in 1945, he was one of the few Jewish soldiers who could speak Yiddish. And he spoke Yiddish to the prisoners of Buchenwald on the first day that that concentration camp was liberated, and they called him their Jewish Angel.”

“The numbers are so horrifying, you can’t even wrap your head around it. That’s why they try to make the Holocaust personal to people so that you learn about someone like Anne Frank or you learn about someone like Schindler.”

“ I don’t have a Holocaust going on in my community that I can help with, but I do have a lot of people very needy, and especially now during this pandemic. So if people can translate this desire to help, that’s my way of remembering, every day, that you’ve got to make a difference.”

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