This is the knowledge that I had taken away from my fourth visit to Yad Vashem. 

Situated high on a Jerusalem hill, Yad Vashem is surrounded by life. Jerusalem pines dot the rocky hills nearby and all around the memorial. The trees are reminiscent of the forests of Eastern Europe that I grew up with: full of vibrancy and life.  The Valley of the Communities is a memorial to the memory of the more than 50,000 Jewish communities in Europe that were either fully or largely wiped out by the Holocaust. You weave through Germany, Poland and Greece and on every silent block of Jerusalem limestone you see names of vanished worlds. Somewhere amongst the rocks are the names of the Ukrainian and Moldovan communities where my grandparents grew up, communities that were forever lost in the Holocaust. My grandparents lived while millions died.

The faces of the communities, their belongings and hard statistics assault my senses when I enter the museum building. From the Torah crowns and identity cards to the piles of books behind barbed wire, the ultimate destruction is inescapable. As I move through the rooms of the museum, I try my best to keep my sadness at bay, especially when my eyes lock onto photos of individuals (children, men, women, and the elderly) with dates of their life, hoping against hope that the years of their life went beyond 1945.

When I leave the complex, I grapple with the names of these vanished communities, but then I remember the life all around. Yad Vashem is circled by trees planted by or for those who risked their lives to keep the sparks of the European Jewish communities from blowing out forever. The living trees of the Righteous Among Nations are a strike against anyone who says that ALL Germans, Poles, Russians, etc. are responsible for the terrible things that happened. The individual trees and on the large plaques grouped by country; the names of the righteous stand for the ultimate defiance of horror. They are beacons of life and light in a deep well of death that bred the Holocaust and sadly continues to breed hate today. As long as there are those that stand up against injustice by saying “No, we will not be party to this,” there is hope for life that shines bright.