“Yad Vashem, Mount of Remembrance, Jerusalem, is Israel‘s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; echoing the stories of the survivors; honoring Jews who fought against their Nazi oppressors and gentiles who selflessly aided Jews in need.”

Of our family of 12, only my mother and I survived the Nazi terror of the Holocaust.  The other 10 were all murdered by the Nazis.  Why?  Because they were Jewish.  After the war my mother continued to be haunted and traumatized by her memories.  Even after coming to America and becoming a successful businesswoman, she repeatedly told me her traumatic war memories to the point that it affected her personality and our relationship.  However, I didn’t want that trauma to affect my life, and I never spoke of it to others.  None of my high school classmates or even college friends knew about it.  When I reached adulthood and independence and spoke my mind, this resulted in periods of total separation from my mother during which I maintained an emotional distance from everything connected with the Holocaust, avoiding books and photos and films about it.  Then in 1995 my wife and I took an archeological tour of the Mediterranean which ended in Jerusalem, where I very reluctantly accompanied my wife to visit Yad Vashem.  There, in the darkness of its exhibits, viewing the horror of emaciated bodies, some alive and some not, I suddenly realized that no one could have survived those dehumanizing conditions without major emotional scarring, yet I had been treating my mother as a normal, emotionally healthy adult.  Returning home, 8 years since I had walked out of her apartment, I phoned a mutual friend, asked him to ask her if she wanted me to visit her.  She did, so we started our relationship again, but this time I treated her with my Yad Vashem realization, and we continued successfully till her passing 8 years later at age 91. 

Arrangements for my current presentation were initiated by Sylvia Moskovitz of the American Society for Yad Vashem, then continued and finalized by Rachel Gelnick, an energetic yet sensitive volunteer who arranged the presentation space for my talk at the Stanford School of Business at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.   After the presentation I enjoyed a long chat with Rachel, and from her words about her grandfather I sensed that he and I would have much in common, especially our overall outlook on life during a difficult period of history.  While he and I both experienced some of humanity’s worst, we could have bemoaned it and continued to live its pain, yet he and I both chose to move forward to make our life and that of our loved ones better.  The audience for this presentation was approximately 40 Stanford graduate students, many of these affiliated with Stanford’s Jewish Business School Association, an on-campus student group.A