Stories From a Daughter of the Holocaust: Remembering Yom HaShoah

Netivyah International

Every spring, on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, the nation of Israel comes to a complete standstill. Sirens wail across the country for two full minutes. Cars pull over on the highway, and drivers step out to stand beside their vehicles. Pedestrians stop in their tracks. Conversations cease.

This is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It typically falls in April or May on the Gregorian calendar, specifically chosen to fall between the end of Passover and Israel's Independence Day. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, honoring both the six million Jewish lives murdered by the Nazi regime and the courage of the Jewish resistance.

While Yom HaShoah is a modern memorial day established by the State of Israel in 1951, the act of mourning national tragedy is thoroughly biblical. We see this pattern in the Book of Lamentations and the weeping of the prophet Jeremiah. The Bible places a heavy weight on memory. The Hebrew word zachor (remember) echoes throughout the Torah. We are commanded to remember what God has done, but also to remember what Amalek, the biblical archetype of baseless hatred against the Jewish people, did to Israel in the desert (Deuteronomy 25:17).

A Biblical Explanation of Israel's Days of Remembrance helps us understand how these national days of mourning fit into the larger calendar of the Jewish people.

On Yom HaShoah, we remember the six million not just as a terrifying statistic, but as individual lives, families, and futures. To understand the weight of this day, we listen to the witnesses. Melanie Webster, a guest writer for our Teaching From Zion magazine, shared the story of her father, Moishe Sol, and how his survival shaped her own life.

The Shadow of Survival

Melanie was born in 1956, well after the end of the Second World War. Yet, she grew up feeling the heavy, lingering smoke of the Holocaust in her childhood home. Raised by a father who survived Auschwitz, Melanie and her siblings experienced what psychologists now call secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Her father, Moishe, was fiercely overprotective. The world outside their door was framed as a dangerous, unpredictable place. If the children were out and failed to call, he would be consumed by panic.

At night, the trauma took on a louder voice. As a young child, Melanie would hear her father wailing in his sleep. In his nightmares, he was back in the camp. He saw his emaciated body in the striped uniform. He felt the suffocating crush of the wooden bunks, where six or seven starving, sick men were forced to sleep on a single shelf meant for three. He would wake up asking the same questions that haunted many survivors: "Why do I deserve this life? Only because I was born a Jew? What did I do? Why me?"

Melanie's mother would wake him to stop the nightmares. After her mother passed away when Melanie was thirteen, that job fell to her. She would yell from her bedroom to wake her father, desperate to pull him out of the horrors of his own memory.

For years, Moishe did not speak to his children about the camps. Instead, he told them about the light that existed before the darkness fell.

A Life Before the Darkness

Moishe Sol was born on April 12, 1922, in Plonsk, Poland. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home by his parents, Israel and Nicha. His father was a tailor, his mother a seamstress.

Plonsk was a town full of Jewish life. Moishe's grandmother, who lived to be 103 after giving birth to thirteen children, sold fruit in the town square. In fact, David Ben-Gurion, who would later become the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel, actually went to school with Moishe's grandmother.

Moishe's childhood was built on tight-knit family bonds, Shabbat dinners, and holiday gatherings. In an era before modern refrigeration, his family kept their food in cooler boxes in the basement, buying fresh produce and meat daily. This respect for fresh, unadulterated food stayed with Moishe his entire life; even in his eighties, he insisted on shopping every few days to avoid preservatives.

But outside the warmth of his home, hatred was already brewing. Jewish and Catholic children in Plonsk were segregated into afternoon and morning school sessions. When their paths crossed, the Polish children would often beat the Jewish students, hurling the centuries-old accusation of "Christ Killers." When a local boy bullied Moishe relentlessly, his mother told him to fight back just once. He did, and the boy never bothered him again. It was a harsh, early lesson in survival.

The Invasion and the Ghetto

Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939. Moishe was seventeen years old.

As the Nazi forces advanced, thousands of Jewish youths fled on foot toward Russia. Moishe and his siblings prepared to join them. But as they reached the door to leave, their mother began to weep. Her tears were too much to bear. Moishe's older sister slammed the door shut, declaring they would not leave their parents behind to face the Nazis alone.

Before the deportations began, the Germans forced the Jews of Plonsk into a crowded ghetto. Two or three families were crammed into single apartments. Food was scarce. Violence was random and constant.

During Rosh Hashanah, the Nazis forced all the Jewish men out of the local synagogue and into the courtyard. They made the men run back and forth until they collapsed from exhaustion. Moishe had to watch his own father, a frail man, fall to the ground.

Then came a moment that shattered the faith of many in the town. The German soldiers entered the beautiful synagogue, carried out the sacred Torah scrolls, threw them into the dirt, and trampled them. In Jewish law, a Torah scroll that falls to the ground must be respectfully buried or retired. To see the Word of God intentionally desecrated was agonizing. The men begged God to intervene. When the heavens remained silent, many of the Orthodox men watching lost their faith entirely. This theological crisis is something Jewish thinkers have grappled with for decades, often referred to as Hester Panim: When God Hides His Face.

Auschwitz and the Number of Life

In 1942, the ghetto was liquidated. Moishe and his family were shoved into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Upon arrival, the brutal reality of the selection process began. Lines were formed: one for forced labor, one for immediate extermination. Moishe and his siblings were directed to the labor line. His parents, deemed too old to work at age forty, were sent to the gas chambers.

Many of Moishe's friends from Plonsk immediately understood the reality of the camp and threw themselves against the electrified fences to end their suffering. Moishe, however, made a quiet, ironclad decision: Hitler was not going to kill him.

He survived through a mixture of immense risk and what he called mazel (blessing or luck). He was often assigned indoor jobs, shielding him from the lethal freezing temperatures. Once, while cleaning a German commander's office, he and a friend stole a few cigarettes to use as currency for food. When officers noticed the stack was tilted, they beat the two boys mercilessly. One officer drew his gun and aimed it at Moishe's head. For reasons no one will ever know, the second officer pushed the gun away and said, "Leave him alone."

Like all prisoners at Auschwitz, Moishe was stripped of his name and branded with a tattoo. His number was 84420.

In Hebrew, letters carry numerical values, a system known as gematria. If you add the digits of Moishe's number, 8 + 4 + 4 + 2 + 0, the total is 18. In Hebrew, the number 18 corresponds to the word Chai, which means "Life." For the rest of her life, Moishe's wife would tell him that he survived the death camp because he was given that specific number on his arm.

Liberation and Bearing Witness

As the war neared its end, the Nazis moved Moishe to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was finally liberated in 1945.

In the chaotic days following liberation, some surviving prisoners took up abandoned weapons to hunt down fleeing German soldiers. Others raided nearby Austrian homes for food and valuables. Moishe refused to participate in either. "Stealing from the Germans will not bring my parents and siblings back from the dead," he reasoned.

Shortly after liberation, General Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the camps. He ordered his troops, the press, and even local German civilians to walk through the facilities to see the atrocities with their own eyes. Eisenhower wisely anticipated a day when people would try to deny the Holocaust ever happened. He wanted to ensure there was irrefutable, first-hand evidence.

For Moishe, survival came with a heavy price. He carried survivor's guilt for the rest of his life, constantly asking why he lived when so many millions, including his own parents and friends, perished.

Meaning for Followers of Yeshua

For believers in Yeshua, Yom HaShoah is not just a Jewish memorial day. It is a day that requires our attention and our humility.

The Holocaust took place in the heart of "Christian" Europe. While there were brave Christians who risked their lives to hide Jewish families, much of the institutional church remained silent, or worse, complicit. Centuries of anti-Jewish theology in Europe helped lay the groundwork for Nazi ideology.

Rabbi Yeshua taught his disciples to love their neighbors and to lay down their lives for one another. When we observe Yom HaShoah, we recognize the tragic gap between Yeshua's teachings and the actions of those who claimed to follow Him in the 1930s and 40s. We also renew our commitment to stand against anti-Semitism wherever it appears. We serve the God of Israel, and we cannot claim to love Him while ignoring the suffering of His chosen people.

Just as the Jewish community mourns the destruction of the Temples on Tisha B'Av, mourning the victims of the Shoah is an act of spiritual solidarity.

How to Mark Yom HaShoah at Home

You do not need to be Jewish or live in Israel to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day. In fact, taking time to remember in your own home is a powerful way to teach the next generation. Here is a simple way to mark the day:

Light a Memorial Candle: In Jewish tradition, a special 24-hour candle called a Yahrzeit candle is lit at sundown on the evening Yom HaShoah begins. You can use any simple candle. Place it on your table and let it burn as a silent witness to the lives that were extinguished.

Read a Story: The sheer number of six million victims is impossible to comprehend. Instead, focus on one. Read Moishe's story to your family, or find the story of another survivor. Speak their names out loud.

Pray for Israel: Read Psalm 10 or Psalm 74 together. Pray for the comfort of the survivors who are still living, for the peace of Jerusalem, and for the courage to stand against hatred in your own community.

Questions people ask

Are there short stories about the Holocaust I can read?

Yes, many survivors have recorded their personal accounts to ensure the world does not forget. Reading a single, personal story, like Moishe Sol's survival in Auschwitz, helps us comprehend the tragedy on a human level rather than just looking at the staggering historical statistics.

Where can I find Holocaust stories of hope?

While the Holocaust is a history of unimaginable darkness, stories of hope are found in the resilience of the survivors and the righteous individuals who risked their lives to save Jewish people. You can find these accounts through organizations like Yad Vashem and in the published memoirs of survivors.

Are there non-Jewish Holocaust survivor stories?

Yes. While the Nazis specifically targeted the Jewish people for total annihilation, they also imprisoned and murdered millions of others. This included Romani people, Polish civilians, political dissidents, people with disabilities, and righteous Gentiles who were caught hiding their Jewish neighbors.

What is a sad Holocaust story that teaches us about survival?

The account of Moishe Sol is both heartbreaking and a powerful lesson in survival. He lost his parents and witnessed the destruction of his community in Poland, yet he made a firm decision to live. His story reminds us of the heavy cost of survival and the importance of bearing witness.