As I stood before the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw, erected in 1948, a flood of uneasy thoughts rushed through my mind. The eastern side of the monument depicts Jewish men, women, and children being led to their deaths. Their faces show loss of hope and despair. Yet amid the sorrow, one figure stood out. A religious leader, possibly a rabbi, clutching a Torah scroll, with surprisingly calm, almost hopeful expression.
What moved me most was the image of a small child, carved to face the street as if watching passersby with quiet curiosity. That child might have been the same age as my father during the liquidation of the ghetto around four years old. While my father has not been in the ghetto, he barely managed to survive with his mother by freeling Ukraine to Azerbaijan, losing several family members, including his own father along the way. As a mother, the sight of that child filled me with terror. I couldn’t help but ask myself: What would I have done if I were in their place?
As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I found a fragile sense of peace in the thought that my father, now 86, and my own six-year-old son were waiting for me back home in Pittsburgh. That continuity of life and family felt like a quiet victory in the face of so much loss.