I stood silently this morning during the siren, largely thinking about those who managed to physically resist while being trapped inside a seemingly invincible machine that controlled every aspect of our lives and was determined to systematically dehumanize and exterminate us.
Yom HaZikaron l’Shoah v’l’Gvura (a day for remembering the Holocaust & the Heroism) is not about mourning what we lost. There are other more appropriate dates for that (we traditionally don’t establish days of mourning in the month of Nisan).
On the tenth of Tevet, we mourn the loss of the individuals butchered by the Nazis on unknown dates. And on the ninth of Av, we mourn the national catastrophe (as an extreme climax to a long series of many painful derivatives that all resulted from a primary injustice).
Today is about something else – commemorating the fact that in the midst of all that horror, a few of us managed to make some Nazis bleed. This day was originally meant to be established on the 14th of Nisan – the anniversary of when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commenced – but that interfered with Pesaḥ so it was delayed a couple weeks.
I don’t judge those who didn’t or couldn’t fight. I’m not even sure I can judge those who collaborated to temporarily save their families. But I think we should acknowledge that within the context of such a system, armed resistance was an expression of us reclaiming our humanity.
One of the primary ways the Germans were able to control us and prevent us from resisting even in situations where we outnumbered them 50-1 was by creating the conditions for each of us to be exclusively concerned with our own personal survival.
Celebrating those who fought isn’t glorifying violence but acknowledging those who were able to break free from the Nazi-induced mentality of narrow self-preservation in order to challenge evil despite the risk to their own lives.
Fighting back was an expression of love stemming from a deep awareness that we are actually more than a mere collection of fragmented individuals. It was reclaiming our humanity after it had been systematically taken from us.
That’s what makes this day and the siren so powerful for me.
