When the Sirens Sound

When the siren sounds signaling the onset of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, I open the window and face the boulevard, the fire station, and the soldiers’ memorial.

Traffic comes to a halt as drivers, passengers, and pedestrians stop and stand at attention. I bow my head and stand in solidarity from the solitude of my dining room.

My tears begin to flow.

Two minutes are not enough to cry six million tears.

Two minutes are not enough to cry for my friend Rosa, who was forced to hand her infant son to her elderly mother at the gates of Auschwitz. Rosa was chosen for life; her baby, husband, and parents, for death.

Two minutes are not enough to cry for Rosa, who, many years and several migrations later, is asked by a great grandchild why she was not killed by Hitler. She answers, “So that you could be born.”

Would I have been able to survive—and with such a sense of dignity and purpose?

Two minutes are not enough to cry for the images of the British Army’s liberation of Bergen Belsen that I watch online from the shelter of a warm, clean, safe home.

Two minutes are not enough to cry for the survivors of Bergen Belsen, whose creaky voices I listen to on a BBC recording. Despite the suffering they endured, and in their weakened state, five days after liberation they belt out “HaTikvah”— “The Hope” — at Sabbath services in the camp, the first conducted openly on German soil since the beginning of the war.

I cry each time I listen to the recording.

Two minutes are not enough to cry for all the orphans.

Two minutes are not enough to cry for all the orphans. Another image I cannot shake: Jewish youth on the deck of a ship recently arrived at the Haifa port from Europe, their shirts rolled up baring numbers branded on their arms. Their joy is short-lived: they are denied entry to Palestine and are deported to Cyprus detention camps — again barbed wire and watch towers.

Two minutes are not enough to cry for great grandparents, great aunts, uncles, and cousins who perished along with an entire world, there, but for the grace of God (and my grandparents’ emigration), my parents would have been born, and I never would have been.

A week later, moods still subdued, the siren sounds anew, this time for Israel’s Memorial Day.

I stand alone, again facing the open window, the fire station, and the soldiers’ memorial, now illuminated.

When the siren wails, I sob.

One minute is not enough to cry 28,000 tears for all the fallen soldiers and those who lost their lives to terror.

One minute is not enough to cry for my son’s friend Paz, an officer who entered a booby-trapped house in search of a terrorist tunnel.

One minute is not enough to cry for my son, an officer in a parallel unit who searched a different house the night before without event, an arbitrary assignment of duties that sealed fates.

One minute is not enough to cry for the loss of friends and comrades.

One minute is not enough to cry for spouses and children left bereft of partners and parents; for my daughter-in-law, brave and protective of my husband and me while we struggled to push away nightmares of her as a young widow. We held our breath, every day a game of Russian Roulette. We got lucky: the chamber was empty.

One minute is not enough to cry for the beautiful faces that stare at me from the pages of the newspaper and for stories of truncated lives.

One minute is not enough to cry for parents whose children will be forever frozen in time, some who hadn’t yet launched studies, careers, fallen in love, married, begun families.

Why did I merit that my child live and theirs not?

Even without the all clear signal, we immediately transition from grief to joy, from mourning to festivity to celebrate our Independence Day.

I have no answers. But I must do more for others. That’s the only way forward.