Reach out and touch a survivor before it’s too late

As the lush spring color is pushing through the ground, bursting all around us, seemingly meeting endless horizons of azure skies, these moments poised for renewal feel muted by an unsaid yet tangible feeling. It might be springtime outside, but within the Jewish community we are in moments of a descending twilight on the generation of Holocaust survivors, soon to become the next stars in the sky of nightfall.

I never dreamed that last year on Holocaust Memorial Day, when I spoke with my beloved Hungarian grandmother, it would be my final telephone conversation with her on this sacred day. I never dreamed that my conversations with Mrs. Lucie Prenzlau and Rabbi Rosenfeld, an Auschwitz survivor, throughout that very week, would be our final Yom Hashoah talk.

In these waning days of the generation of Holocaust survivors, Yom Hashoah takes on additional intensity.

Growing up in the 1970s in Israel, before I had any clue what their sinister meaning was, the numbers I saw burned into their skin was “normal.” I was surrounded by the numbers.

Each of us in our communities are still blessed to have our “Elie Wiesels,” a flesh face to represent the Holocaust to the world.

This week we come out and humbly pay tribute with our mere presence before these men and women who were stripped of their humanity, stripped of their family, stripped of their Judaism, stripped of everything — yet who overcame. If you truly can’t be there in person, give a call to a Holocaust survivor. These conversations can be sobering and emotional. Facing a witness to one of history’s most brutal and dark chapters is not easy.

But their days are numbered.

The Holocaust museums around the world are all standing. “Never Forget” has become the mantra. You can walk their dark and silent halls of candles lit for the children, pass over the pits of real live human beings’ shoes — all murdered; learn the history and see the relics, the artifacts, the exhibits. They’re all in place, so that we never forget.