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A Sunny Afternoon in 1980

A Sunny Afternoon in 1980

I’ll never forget a beautiful sunny afternoon in 1980 when I decided to visit a shopping mall in Los Angeles. After walking around and window shopping for a while, I bought a soda pop and saw a nice indoor fountain with people sitting around it. I walked over and sat down with my drink.

A Chance Encounter by the Fountain

There were no cell phones in 1980 (hard to imagine, right?), so as I sipped my drink, I started looking around. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a man, maybe in his 60s, sitting near me around the fountain. Summer in LA meant short sleeves, so instead of looking at the man’s face, my eyes immediately focused on a tattoo he had on his arm.

A Mark of Survival

The tattoo was very basic – a capital letter “A” followed by a string of numbers. For a second, I froze, not knowing what to do or say. The realization that I was sitting next to a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz was overpowering. Unfortunately, my memory fails me about what happened after that. I don’t even remember if I said hello or if we talked at all. Some situations go beyond what words can ever say.

The Story of Auschwitz Survivors

The story of almost all survivors of Auschwitz is painfully similar: starvation, misery, torture, medical experimentations, gas chambers, and whole families wiped off the face of the earth.

The Danger of Forgetting History

Today, it’s getting easier in some places to rewrite history and claim that the murder of six million innocent Jews never happened. The number of Holocaust survivors is rapidly approaching zero, and we can no longer depend on our educational institutions to teach our children this history.

Our Responsibility to Remember and Educate

We must now take on that responsibility ourselves. Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Please consider doing your part – tell someone, especially children, about the horrors that follow anti-Semitism. Sadly, anti-Semitism is once again widespread and growing around the world.

“Never Forget”

Those who fail to remember and teach history are doomed to repeat it. Please keep that in mind when you see the 10 Commandments of Moses being taken down or challenged. History is ours to lose and repeat unless we choose to “Never forget.”