My main source of strength in this whole story is my grandmother. When she gave birth to twins in the hospital, one of the caregivers there asked her whether she’d be willing to give a daughter up for adoption. “You already have Ben Tzion and Mazal” (in the picture, my mother with Mazal.)

My uncle’s wife told me that my grandmother was shocked by the question, and consulted with my uncle about how to react. Her innocence, and maybe also the fact that she was facing a caregiver who had helped her so much as my grandmother understood it, made her feel embarrassed to say immediately that she did not consent. Later on she told the caregiver she refused.

When grandma returned to the hospital a few days later, the caregiver told her that one the daughters had died. That’s it. No body, no grave.

I can barely imagine what she must have gone through in her heart and in her mind. This is the difficult moment. I do not believe that my grandmother--as I knew her with her integrity and her innocence--could have even digested that someone would be capable to do such a thing. This was beyond her understanding. But on the other side, the opposite made no sense either. Certain things you feel whether they are true or not with a clear gut feeling. The power relations in that generation did not allow them to raise their voice, but little by little the grandchildren wake up and demand answers--and if not answers, at the very least memory.

We have established by ourselves a day of awareness because the establishment refuses to acknowledge this Holocaust. Eventually they will have no choice because they will have to understand this illusion: we do not need them; the voice, the memory, and the truth depend only on us.

Shlomi Hatuka