Thread by @fraying

Today is #HolocaustRemembranceDay and I've been thinking about what to say all day.

I am who and what and where I am because of the Holocaust. In so many ways.

I was born in the US, but my dad was born in Austria in a Displaced Persons Camp. He was there because his parents fled their tiny town of Dobre, Poland, before the real killing started.

Grandma and Grandpa left the only homes they'd ever known, in their early 20s, because they knew what their neighbors would do when the nazis arrived. The Jews were always considered separate, less than. They weren't even allowed to go to school. It didn't take much.

Grandma would never give me a real answer about why she left Dobre. She said she "saw things" and that there were "bad men." I think she saw a neighbor rape her sister. Either way, she left. She ran. And that decision saved her.

Almost all the Jews in Dobre were killed. Many were killed not my nazis, but by their neighbors. Just to take their land. The Jews in Poland weren't considered people, anyway. When nazis started putting them on trains, nobody complained.

The Powazeks that didn't run were killed in their homes, or put on trains to camps, or they hid in the woods to try to wait it out. Many of my family were taken to Birkenau. Most died there.

Grandma and Grandma were often separated when they were on the run. Grandpa was taken and put in the Russian Army for a while. Grandma was, at times, sewing uniforms for the Russians, and at other times homeless, depending on the kindness of strangers.

She had her first child, Sam, somewhere along the line. Imaging raising a baby, alone, in another country, with nothing. I can't even imagine it.

At some point Grandma found her sister, who had made a life as an "assimilatur" - she hid her Jewishness and had a powerful boyfriend who kept her safe.

Later, somehow, Grandpa found them. Together they received word that Charlie (in Yiddish, "Cheel") was alive. But Grandma and Grandpa both had a sibling with that name. They went to the train station to meet him, and it was Grandma's brother. He had been hiding in the forest.

It would turn out later that Grandma had a few family members that survived. But Grandpa had none. He'd come from a big family. They were all dead.

Imagine your whole generation was juts gone. And everyone who came before. And it was done by your neighbors. You don't recover from something like that. They never did.

They were in the DP camp for years after the war was over and the countries argued about who would take the poor refugee Jews. America wasn't the welcoming place it makes itself out to be.

Dad was born in that camp, in limbo, waiting for a country to take us. Australia offered to take us and Grandpa wanted to go. But Grandma was settled on America. "You go," she said. But he never would leave her.

Eventually Grandma's sister married another survivor who had been in Auschwitz and had the numbers and they were allowed in. They moved to Buffalo, NY, and could officially sponsor Grandma and Grandpa, plus my Dad and his brother, to move.

They took a very slow boat to NYC, passing Lady Liberty, and stepped off at Ellis Island, like so many others.

I am here today because they survived all that.

They're no longer here with us, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't think of them.

I know grandma would like the farm I have now. I bet she'd think it looked a bit like Dobre, here in the woods, with the sounds of goats and chickens.

I miss you, bubbe.

And I know that they'd want you to know this, because they repeated it to me my whole life.

Everything can be taken away from you in a moment. That's why you have to stick up for other people. Because you're next.

You're always next.