"I Asked My Holocaust Survivor Grandmother About Her Hand. Then She Burst Into Tears"

Memory in the Living Room: Businesswoman Nicole Raidman wrote a special column about her grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. She recounted her childhood experience when she noticed the number tattooed on her grandmother's hand. "'Grandma, what's that on your hand?' I asked innocently when I was 5, and then she burst into tears," Raidman wrote in a special column published on Walla. "'When you grow up, I'll tell you,' my grandmother said. Since then, I was quite afraid to ask, because I saw immense pain and sadness in her eyes. When we immigrated to Israel, I was 10, and the first thing my grandmother did was visit Jerusalem, to 'Yad Vashem.' We stood by the vast wall of names; she read them with a choked voice and the tears just wouldn't stop."

"'Who are they?' I asked, and then grandmother replied: 'This is my whole family, Rabbi Moshe Glazer and all his children, they were murdered by the Nazis, they and 6 million other Jews.' When I asked why they were murdered, she replied: 'Just because they were Jews.'"

Raidman notes that "as a child, I experienced anti-Semitism in school in the city of Odessa, Ukraine, where I was born. They would call me a 'stinking Jew.' I would come home from school crying, because I didn't understand how I was different from others. Because of this hatred, my parents left everything and decided to immigrate to Israel, as for us, Jews in the diaspora, 'there is no other country - a country where a Jew can feel safe and at home.'"

She notes that the massacre on Simchat Torah is "the day the second Holocaust of the Jewish people began. The atrocities and brutal murders, burning people alive and the survivors' stories, compared to my grandmother's stories, even more terrible and frightening than the Holocaust. Yes, and all this happened right here, in our country, the State of the Jews, the place that was supposed to be the safest for us."

"Anti-Semitism in the world returned in a tsunami wave, the fear and anxiety of identifying as a Jew abroad, the aggression and boycotts against the State of Israel, taking us back 80 years and making us understand that nothing has changed since, rather the opposite, it has worsened. The 'Never Again' is 'Again and now.'"

"But why? Why are Jews going through this again? Why do they hate us? What have we done wrong? Why do we have to be afraid to be Jews?" These are the questions my children already ask me, and I really have no answer except to tell them: we are the chosen people - and that's the secret. Our grandparents went through this terrible hell so that we would have a future, and we too must go through this for the sake of our children's future."

"Jews in the Holocaust were very united, and the will to survive the hell in order to defeat the cruel enemy saved them, and ultimately they won. We will also win. Today, when the world is against us, when the enemy around us wants to destroy us, if we are not united and if we look for enemies among ourselves, we will not succeed."

"Today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day for the victims then and now, we must do everything to ensure it never happens again. Our secret weapon, which no one else in the world has, is unity. When we are together, we are invincible."

Raidman further described the symbolism of the yellow Star of David patch during the Holocaust, marking Jews, which "returns today as a yellow pin that we all wear for the return of the hostages. But this time it's our choice to wear this symbol, because it is the symbol that unites us all for the most important goal, the swift return of the hostages home."

She ended the column with: "Nechama Nicole Raidman, granddaughter of Laura Weisman of blessed memory and great-granddaughter of Rabbi Moshe Glazer of blessed memory."