May. 2022. 9:43 am.

“Do any of you know what the Holocaust was?”

My teacher stands at the front of the classroom, pencil in hand, her face grave. She surveys the room of 7th graders, from those bouncing in their chairs to those staring out the window to those thinking about the lunch menu.

I wait for the faces to turn serious. I wait for the hands to shoot into the air like rockets launching into space. I wait for the confident head nods.

I wait.

And wait.

I am suddenly aware of the seconds ticking by on the clock, each shift of the hand making me more impatient. I start to tap my fingers on the wooden desk in front of me.

Someone say something.

Why isn’t someone saying something?

Why is it so quiet?

Why are the seconds so loud?

At last, there is an audible shift in a seat, and someone tentatively raises their hand. My head snaps up; my fingers still. The loud ticking of the clock dims ever so slightly.

“Some . . . bad thing that happened to the Jews . . . by a guy named Hitler?”

My heart huds to the soles of my worn gray sneakers, and my eyebrows rise to the beginnings of my brown curls. I bite my lip, hoping the pain of the bite will drown out the pain of my classmates’ ignorance, but the response wins the tug-of-war in my heart.

The tiniest claws of doubt begin to prickle my mind, but I banish them to the section of my mind labeled “save for later,” which really means never think about again. Instead, I let my weak reassurances fill my mind. The hopefulness of seventh-grade Jewish me promised that the next few weeks would teach them about the Holocaust.

That the next month, the Holocaust unit, would teach the meaning of “never again.”

Little did I know that at the end, instead of shining brighter than ever, those two words would lay scattered around my feet, the promise shattered and the hope of understanding from my non-Jewish classmates vanished

Two weeks later. Same room. 2:08 pm.

The image burns my mind, the flames of anger, sadness, and pain searing out the noise of everyone around me. The hollow eyes of the starved Jewish prisoners, with their muddy yellow stars sewed onto their ragged, threadbare clothing, stare back at me, as if begging me to give them a way out.

I know there is nothing I can do. Their story has already been written and sealed ten times over, and fed to the flames that await them.

My eyes travel over the cramped cattle cars, and my heart begins to thud in my ears, faster and faster like a cart rolling down the hill, picking up more and more momentum as it does so. And then—

“Now that is natural selection.”

The sound of my classmate’s voice cuts through the image and rips apart the stars of David. It leaves behind a jagged trail of paper shreds and hurt. I glance around, searching for a familiar Jewish face, someone I know realizes the sting of those words, and realize—I am alone. The only Jewish kid in my class. The only one who can truly understand the horrors of the Holocaust.

Blaming the extinction or death of a species on “natural selection” implies that the species is inherently weak and ill equipped to handle the environment, and so they naturally die out, while the stronger species dominate. By pinning the deaths of Jews during the Holocaust on natural selection, the boy in my class labeled the Jewish people as “different” from the rest and their deaths as simply natural and inevitable, blatantly ignoring the pure evil of the Holocaust and its goal. At best, the boy’s words were unacceptably ignorant; at worst, they were antisemitic.

My teacher’s rushed words collide in a heap of confusing sounds, all at once trying to explain how the boy is wrong and doing her best to move on before anyone can recognize what exactly had been said. It was an easy task. Other than the brief period of overwhelming laughter, my peers had already moved on, already taken his words from their memories and offered them up to air that had suddenly become stiff and cold. At least, for me. No one else seemed to notice its suffocating grip.

I sit there, the voice of my teacher now a distant static in my ear.

I sit.

And sit.

Three weeks later. Boston. 5:24 pm.

“He said what?”

My parents’ questions are flung at me sharp and fast like throwing darts, in such succession that I can barely hear where one question ends and the next begins. With each one, I sink a little lower in my chair. With each one, the memory comes back to bite me, and I have to force myself to not shrink away from its lunge.

Their emotions are much easier to pick out from the whirlwind of words. They go from confusion to astonishment to concern to appall and anger in a matter of minutes, and I silently berate myself for having brought the topic up. I had hoped to shove it away, back into that box of “don’t think about it”. Evidently, I had failed.

“I . . .” My voice falters. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, ‘you don’t know’? How do you not know what happened?”

The barely visible lift of my shoulders is performed.

“I just don’t know,” I respond quietly, gaze turned downwards.

One week later. Home. 7:56 pm.

My thumb and forefinger have gripped the page for so long, they have left an irreversible crease. My eyes barely notice as they scan, for the fiftieth time, the words in front of me.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. 

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. 

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. 

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

Never.”

I let the words climb over me, feeling around, finding nooks and crannies in my mind to slip into. I let them burn bright in front of me, in deep hues of crimson and violet and gold. 

Elie Wiesel’s Night, from that day onward, left a mark on me. Those words especially brought me to tears, and as I write this, those same tears of a year and a half ago have begun to stream down my face.

Never has a book changed me so much as Night did.

Never had I quite realized the meaning of the word “power” until I read the book.

It was then that I learned.

And learned.

I learned of the power of words and the power of the Holocaust; the power of fire and the power of memory; the power of desire and the power of one man; and the power of all those things when they converge into 8 sentences.

The memoir stands as a tribute to the six million Jews who lost their lives, and as a memory of one Jew’s suffering at the hands of evil. It is the sort of passage that turns children into adults, and Jewish children into B’nai mitzvot. It changes one’s mind—the way one thinks, feels, acts.

Suddenly, in the darkest moments of one man’s life, I found the lightest moments in mine.

One and a half years later. October. 2023. 1:02 pm.

The air is thick and suffocating.

I half heartedly move to roll up my sleeves, but my hands never make it past my wrists. Instead, they lay there on the cuffs of my sweatshirts, refusing to act, and try as I might, I can’t find it within myself to push them up.

A boy, chair pushed up against the window in a little pocket of space amongst the room crowded with students and faculty, is in the middle of another sorrow-filled testimony of pain. His words are lost to the frothing sea of my mind, but at some point, his voice cracks, sounding like a piece of glass that has tried to hold itself together but, ultimately, can no longer pretend . . .

And something within me starts to break as well.

Faces are already streaked with tears across the room; Jewish students across the four grades of high school come together with Jewish teachers to express the emotion of the week to listening administrators. The terrorist attacks on Israel—the unthinkable crimes of antisemitism committed— have left fresh wounds that, when they heal, will leave scars that will never fade. October 7th will never again be just “October 7th”. Every person in that room will remember October 7th. Every person in that room will realize that it is the 7th day of the month, and think of the time passed and the months gone by and wonder if the pain will ever recede.

The night before, I had sobbed, curled up in my bed, at the cruelty of the world, appalled not only by the blatant acts of terrorism and anti-semitism perpetuated by Hamas, but by people’s denial and even praise of those acts. Now, the fracture that has been slowly growing over the week turns into a schism.

At first, I do my best to suppress the tears, but the effort is futile. The more I blink and wipe them away, the more they flow. Finally, I let them fall without stopping, and the cool splashes of water on my cheek are neverending reminders of the terrible reality I now find myself living in.

When the session has finished, I make my way over to my friend and give her a large hug, one that clearly says all the emotions and feelings of the past week in it.

I hug her.

And hug.

I hug for those who can no longer hug their loved ones, for the young lives lost, their sole crime being their Jewishness.

I hug to vaporize the fear of rising antisemitism in a climate no longer willing to recognize antisemitism as antisemitism.

I hug to ward off the pain of the collective suffering of the Jewish people.

Another emotion runs through me with that hug, one of pure gratitude. The Jewish people’s shared sense of community connects each Jew worldwide, and I know that it will always be there to catch me should I fall. It is one of the aspects I love most about the Jewish people.

December. School. 11:14 am.

“Happy Hanukkah!” the sign reads in large, glittering blue and white letters.

I resist the urge to scream of happiness. My eyes travel across the room, from the hordes of chattering middle schoolers to the busy latke station to the posters detailing the ancient story of Hanukkah, the one I know by heart. For a moment, I catch my friend’s eyes, and in that second, understanding passes between us.

We each understand the importance of the celebration to us.

We each know the tears, the pain, the fear of the past two months.

And we each know that makes the joyful display of Jewish pride and happiness all the more meaningful and special.

There is a half-eaten piece of gelt in my hand. The tip of the shamash has been bitten off, but the rest of the menorah is still intact. The flames of the menorah’s candles are chocolate, but even two-dimensional and edible, they radiate a warm and loving glow. They beckon you closer, as if to embrace you in a hug.

Yes, even in chocolate, the Jewish spirit stays strong.

Popping the gelt into my mouth, I take a brief moment to smile at the two Hanukkah “mensches on benches,” as my biology teacher called them, a Jewish twist on the traditional “elf on a shelf.” The comically large hats—one blue, one gold, coincidentally our school colors—are pulled over the mensches’ eyes; the star of David is proudly tacked onto one of the hats, and a menorah is on the other. One of the mensches holds a dreidel; the other’s hair is braided in the shape of challah. They have attracted laughter and levity, and, at a time when college presidents refuse to condemn calls for genocide against Jews as a violation of their codes of conduct, are a whimsical reminder of the love and optimism of the Jewish people.

7 hours later. Home. 6:17 pm.

For the last two months, since October 7th, I have been reflecting on my Jewish identity.

The Holocaust unit of 7th grade, taking place a month after my bat mitzvah, failed the Jewish students at my school. The unit provided nowhere near the needed time to properly cover such a traumatic event; no one, besides the Jewish students and a few others, read or even picked up the supposedly required book, Night; and a chance for non-Jewish students to learn about the impact of the Holocaust became another source of numb sadness for Jewish students instead. Which is why, since then, I have been working to help raise awareness of antisemitism and showcase Jewish pride and happiness in my school and different communities.

Growing up with Jewish parents proud of their Jewish identity and heritage, I learned tales of Jewish strength and perseverance through centuries. The stories inscribed in the Torah and the traditions passed down l’dor v’dor—from generation to generation—became engraved in blue and white ink in my mind and in my heart. They explain to me the persecution and suffering of our past, from countless exiles and expulsions of the Russian pogroms and the Holocaust.

Yet even as they described the hurt of the past, they also showed the light we managed to keep along the way: The ever-burning candle of Jewish pride and hope.

The Jewish people have always strived to be the light in darkness, that one flickering golden hope people can cling to. Light is at the center of every Jewish holiday. We light two candles every Friday night for Shabbat. It is perhaps for that reason that I am so drawn to the ideal of light in darkness. 

Rabbi Sacks, a famous British rabbi, once said, “There were always two ways to live in a world that is often full of darkness and tears. We can either curse the darkness or we can light a light, and as the Chassadim say, a little light drives out much darkness. May we all help light up the world.”

So today, on the first day of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, I light a candle not only for the story, not only for tradition, but because somewhere out there, there is a little pocket of darkness that needs a light.

I can only hope that my candle brightens that darkness.