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Amy Fried is a political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
In the rush of news and everyday life, it’s easy to focus on our plans. But there are terrible things that happened that we should never forget.
Finding ways to remember past sufferings can help people empathize and prompt action.
One means for me is Passover, a holiday focused on the biblical story of how enslaved Jews gained freedom and fled Egypt. Jews hold a ceremony, the Seder, as we go through a sort of script, the Haggadah, explaining the symbolic foods and telling the tale. And we have our sumptuous meal.
Each year I have sat around a table hearing the Passover question “How is this night different from all other nights?” When I was a child, it was asked in my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn as I drank grape juice. The last few years the question has been offered on Zoom and my glass held red wine.
Passover stands on its own but also often prompts consideration of others. This year we acknowledged the Ukrainian people’s fight against Russia’s invasion and war crimes.
This commemoration of leaving one place to become free elsewhere has been a part of Judaism for millennia and our sacred texts remind us we should stand up for refugees, for “we were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Many years Seders were not done in warm places with plenty to eat. They were even held in concentration camps.
One version from those terrible places was written by a young woman, Regina Honigman, who was deported from her home in Poland to the Gabersdorf Labor Camp, where she was forced to engage in slave labor.
In her diary Honigman rewrote parts of the Haggadah to fit her horrific circumstances. She asked “Why is this night different from all other nights?” and answered, “Because in our misery, as Jews we are stronger. The night is very long and very dark. In vain, the longing and loneliness in our Jewish hearts flows. Dawn is coming, another day of hope. … Oh, when in our lifetime will a day come, when we will not eat the bitter vegetables every night?”
Honigman also chronicled life in the slave labor camp. One entry read, “We go to bed and our eye close from exhaustion … But we, who dream of freedom, cannot sleep. … a cry breaks from our imprisoned hearts and many sighs drown in tears. … The moon smiles, the trees rustle – and a song of freedom comes from our hearts. We do not lose courage because we rebel in our hearts.”
Among those included in Honigman’s diary was Hela Cymbler, the aunt of a relative of mine. As my relative wrote recently, “On April 22, 1942, an 18-year-old Jewish girl, who was ripped away from her loving family in Zawiercie (Wartenau in German), German-occupied Poland, and deported almost 350 kilometers from her home to a German slave labor camp called Gabersdorf, in Trutnov, Sudetenland, inscribed herself in the diary of her campmate, Regina Honigman.”
Hela Cymbler’s entry 80 years ago called for hope. She drew pictures of flowers and exhorted Regina “not to despair,” proclaiming “we will survive.”
After the war, Regina Honigman married a man she met at a Displaced Persons Camp and had two children.
But tragically, Hela Cymbler was kept from having a family and life itself. After becoming prisoner number 56073 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was killed in its gas chambers. As my relative explained, “Nothing remains of Hela other than some photos that I found in a cousin’s shoe box in Buenos Aires and the page in Regina Honigman’s diary.”
Regina Honigman’s and Hela Cymbler’s hope and friendship helped them in very dark days. They took strength from each other and from Passover, the holiday of liberation. But their optimism was not, could not be enough to save both of them and millions more murdered by Nazis. Nor could the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto uprising hold off Germans bent on genocide.
Let the memories of their lives remind us of the importance of holding onto humanity in dark times and the need to stand up for others who are suffering and oppressed.
