As survivors fade, children must carry message forward

Tucsonan Rosie Eilat-Kahn’s brother, Gerald B. Neuman of Los Angeles, wrote the following while sitting shiva for their mother, Susan Neuman. Eilat-Kahn read the essay at Tucson’s Yom HaShoah Commemoration on April 11.
The marks of age show all over the once toned strong arms. Where once the tattoo drew immediate recognition, now bruises and blood spots overtake the body’s landscape. In all, the meaning is as clear as the physical reality, the numbers are fading.
In most circumstances the fading of a tattoo is a person’s ultimate surrender to age and the passing of youth’s reckless abandon. For me it’s a heart-wrenching journey with profound implication. It is a personal tragedy coupled with a recognition of deep social responsibility. It is the acceptance of change in familial structure combined with a need to ensure a once strong social voice is not silenced. It is the witnessing of a parent succumbing to age and disease only to see that their ultimate death is more than a private loss.
It wasn’t long ago that I sat with my parents at their kitchen table, staring at their tattoos, willing myself to brand the image in my mind so as to never forget the markings’ significance even when their physical form is gone. A4455, A4455, A4455 ... memorize, memorize; A16371, A16371, A16371, remember, remember.
My parents no longer talk about their experience during World War II, my mom silenced by cancer then death, my dad muted by the impact of age on his body and mind. However, the memories they shared, the stories they told live on in our family. Through those memories and stories we have learned the nature and circumstances of their experiences and through those experiences have learned about them.
However, as my mom would say after telling her story or seeing a movie or reading an article about the Holocaust, each story was only one of millions. Like grains of sand on the beach, each story or experience was just one small part of the whole. Perhaps the metaphor is better thought of as a Zen garden where the arrangement of the sand or pebbles has a certain meaning to the person contemplating the garden, but when the sand is disturbed, the pebbles rearranged or removed, the meaning changes.
That is where we are today — the pebbles are rapidly being removed. The meanings are being changed and as the numbers fade and ultimately disappear, the garden is lost to those who would contemplate it through first-hand experience.
Millions have faded to thousands, thousands will fade to hundreds, hundreds to one and finally one will fade to none. Hence the import of a private loss becoming a public responsibility. For those of us whose parent carried the numbers, the blood that is carried in our veins is that of victim and survivor. We are the pebbles to be added back to the garden and their accounts are the sands which must be replaced through us. We must speak, we must write, we must teach and we must act. Now it is our time, now it is our responsibility. For those who do not share this lineage, now is the time to learn, to memorize and to remember.