Blogs > "NEVER SAY" - HOLOCAUST AND HEROISM DAY

May 1, 2006

"NEVER SAY" - HOLOCAUST AND HEROISM DAY



My official name Rissel Zlata. Rissel was my father's sister and Zlata my mother's. Both were young mothers who were given a choice between handing over their babies or going to the oven with them. Rissel's mother in law offered to accompany her grandson."You are young," she told Rissel,"you may survive." The Germans killed the young by working them do death. Still, some survived. But Rissel would not hear of it. She was one of many likeminded mothers.

On Yom Hashoa when I light the memorial candle for my dead family members, I think of them and hope that I inherited some of their courage as well as that of my partisan uncle Mordechai."Never Say" by Hirsh Glick was his song and it is still mine:

Never say there is only death for you.
Leaden skies may be concealing days of blue -
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: We are here!

From land of palm-tree to the far-off land of snow,
We shall be coming with our torment and our woe.
And everywhere our blood has sunk into the earth,
Shall our bravery, our vigor blossom forth!

We’ll have the morning sun to set our day aglow,
And all our yesterdays shall vanish with the foe,
And if the time is long before the sun appears,
Then let this song go like a signal through the years.

This song was written with our blood and not with lead;
It’s not a song that birds sing overhead,
It was a people, among toppling barricades,
That sang this song of ours with pistols and grenades.

So never say that there is only death for you.
Leaden skies may be concealing days of blue -
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: We are here!



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