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his truck and stood next to it. Other drivers and passengers got out of their cars and stood. Then I heard the siren.

The siren called in the distance. It wailed. It cried.

It remembered.

This is about not forgetting

This is about remembering the dead.

This is about saving the living.

This is Shoah Remembrance Day. This is (re)membering. This is not forgetting.

Remember this image:

The bus driver stood. All of us inside the bus stood. Pedestrians stood still on the streets.
No one moved.
Not anywhere as far as the horizon in front, as far as the horizon in back, as far as the horizon to the right, as far as the horizon to the left did anyone move.
We remembered.

A nation remembered the Holocaust, the Shoah. For a brief moment, a siren's mournful wail, and a silent, standing people stretched time into the past. Everything was still.

Time reached from the past to this future.

Some of us on the bus remembered that during our generation, six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Some of us remembered that during our parents' generation or our grandparents' generation the Shoah was. Some likely remembered lost family members, or at least the names and echoing memories of those lost in their family.

Time reached from the past to the present and asked us about the future. What will we do? How will we measure ourselves? Who will we save, besides ourselves?

This is about not forgetting the suffering.
This is about trying to find meaning from the darkest times.
This is about remembering the living before they are dead.
This is about remembering the dead who were among the living.

The siren sound fell. Everyone on the bus sat back down, the pedestrians hurried along their ways again, and the moment the flashing yellow light joined the red light in front of us, a couple of horns sounded their drivers' impatience.

Perhaps it is fitting. For even after our moment of remembrance, genocide continues in our own time. Distant places names
like East Timor,
Rwanda,
and most recently,
Sudan echo like impatient horns.

Cambodia. Russia. The Americas in the 15th through 19th Centuries. History echoes with remembering the holocaust.

Remember this image:

Time for us to get a move on.
Time to go. Somewhere. Anywhere.

But here.

The horns honk, so we cannot stop to think. The traffic moves, commerce must continue. The people on the sidewalks hurry on to wherever it is that they are going.

These words are about not forgetting.
Not forgetting is about finding meaning even in the darkest times.
Not forgetting is about remembering, now, in the present.
Remembering the holocaust is about not forgetting who died.
Remembering the holocaust is about not forgetting who dies today.

This is why you and I must never forget the Shoah (the Holocaust).

Learn more about this author, Michael Deqel.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

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