Dina Gordon | Epoch Times
[caption id="attachment_2364" align="alignleft" width="300"] The phrase on the main entrance gateway to the Auschwitz camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau translates to “Work will make you free”, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp (Neil, wikimedia)[/caption]
I was born in Croatia a year before the second world war ended. I don’t remember much, but I still have the sense of fear and terror down to the deepest level of every cell in my body. I sucked it with my mother’s milk.
I still have a heavy album full of black and white pictures of people whose names I don’t know. They are all my family members, but I don’t recognize them. I never dared to ask my mother. Every weekend over Saturday family lunch she would tell lively stories about uncles and aunts and cousins. I loved the first part of these stories, but they all ended with the same sentence: “But they all have gone in the war.” I didn’t understand what it meant, but I didn’t dare to ask her.
As I grew older I did ask her once, “What does it mean?” and she said with a gloomy voice: “You know, in the ‘lager’ (the word for concentration camp in Croatian).” It didn’t make it clearer for me. I guess I just didn’t want to understand, as the true story was too horrifying and too painful to grasp.
I remembered all this as I was planning my trip to Poland for the ceremonies of the remembrance day on Jan. 27, which marks 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the most notorious concentration camp. Growing up in Israel with the family memories of the Holocaust, I preferred to forget everything related to the Holocaust except one thing: The vow “never again” to anyone on any place on the planet, which was set deep in me.