The Tattooed Hand: Remembering a Grandmother’s Holocaust Testimony

Businesswoman Nicole Raidman wrote a personal column about her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, describing what her grandmother lived through as a child — and the moment Nicole first noticed the number tattooed on her hand. “’Grandma, what do you have on your hand?’ I asked innocently when I was five, and then she burst into tears,” Raidman wrote in a piece published on Walla. “’When you grow up I’ll tell you,’ my grandmother said. Since then I was somewhat afraid to ask, because I felt the enormous pain and sadness in her eyes. When we emigrated to Israel I was ten, and the first thing my grandmother did was go to to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. We stood by a huge plaque of names; she read them with a choked voice and the tears just wouldn’t stop.”

“’Who are they?’ I asked, and my grandmother answered: ‘That’s my whole family, Rabbi Moshe Glazer and all his children — they were murdered by the Nazis, them and six million Jews.’ When I asked why they were killed, she answered: ‘Just because they were Jews.’”

From Odessa to Israel — childhood, antisemitism and the decision to leave

Raidman recalls: “As a child I endured antisemitism at school in the city of Odessa, Ukraine, where I was born. They used to call me ‘stinking Jewess.’ I would come home from school and cry because I didn’t understand how I was different from others. Because of that hatred, my parents left everything and decided to emigrate to Israel, because for us — Jews of the diaspora — ‘there is no other country: a country where a Jew can feel safe and at home.’”

“Again and now” — why she sees today as a repeat of the past

Raidman refers to the massacre on Simchat Torah “the day the second Holocaust of the Jewish people began." The atrocities and the cruel killings, burning people while still alive, and the survivors’ stories — compared to my grandmother’s stories, these are even worse and more terrifying than the Holocaust. 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.

“Antisemitism around the world has returned in a tsunami wave; the fear and anxiety about identifying as Jewish abroad, the aggression and boycotts against the State of Israel, take us back 80 years and make us understand that nothing has changed — rather the opposite: it has worsened. ‘Never Again’ is ‘Again and now.’”

"Why are Jews going through this again? Why do they hate us? What did we do wrong? Why must we be afraid to be Jewish?” These are questions her children already ask her. Her answer is frank and rooted in identity: “I don’t really have an answer other than to tell them: we are the chosen people — and that is the secret. Our grandparents went through that terrible furnace so that we would have a future, and we must go through this for the sake of our children’s future as well.”

Unity as the “secret weapon”

Raidman draws strength from solidarity: “Jews in the Holocaust were very united and the desire to survive the furnace in order to overcome the cruel enemy saved them, and in the end they prevailed. We will also prevail. Today, when the whole world is against us, when the enemy around us wants to annihilate us, if we are not united and if we look for enemies among ourselves, we will not succeed.

“Today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day for those murdered then and now, we must do everything so that this never happens again. Our secret weapon, which nobody else in the world has, is unity. When we are together, we are unbeatable.”

The yellow star re-imagined — a symbol reclaimed for a cause

Raidman reflected on the symbolism of the yellow Star of David patch used to mark Jews in the Holocaust, noting that it “has returned today as a yellow pin we all wear for the return of the hostages. This time however it is our choice to wear that symbol, because it is the emblem that unites us around the most important goal of bringing the hostages home quickly.”

She closed her column with her signature: “Nechama (Nicole) Raidman, granddaughter of the late Laura Weisman and great-granddaughter of the late Rabbi Moshe Glazer.”