This Holocaust Remembrance Day, We Must Remember Hate Spreads Faster Than COVID-19

On this Holocaust Day of Remembrance, which falls on the 75th anniversary of liberation, I’d like to talk about my father. Mendek Rubin was a brilliant inventor, a wise and kind man who survived three torturous years as a slave laborer in seven Nazi concentration camps.

Born in the small town of Jaworzno, Poland, in 1924, he grew up during terrifying times, as fierce anti-Semitism generated in Germany fanned the flames of hatred in surrounding countries. After watching their gentle, sensitive 17-year-old son — my father — taken away by German soldiers, my grandparents soon were deported to Auschwitz, where they were killed, along with three of my father’s sisters and his brother.

When I was young, my parents never spoke about what had happened to them, although clues were everywhere. A profound sadness and an aura of secrecy permeated our house. My mother had a string of numbers tattooed in blue ink on the soft skin above her wrist, but no one ever told me what it meant. My Aunt Bronia also had numbers tattooed on her arm, and for a long time, I thought she was my father’s only sibling. The aura of sadness and secrecy felt even thicker at her house.

My parents remained silent because the pain was too overwhelming to face, and because they’d grown accustomed to mimicking the silence of the world around them as their families were being annihilated. My mother now is 91, and still insists no one cares. She is not surprised that two-thirds of millennials don’t even know what Auschwitz was.

My Aunt Bronia remained silent about the Holocaust for 50 years, but now, her life goal is to share her story with the world, yet she still censors the truth because the intimate details of torture and humiliation she and her sisters endured are more than most want to hear.

“We are all connected by love, and our heart as our center of gravity is always our truest and most helpful guide.” — Mendek Rubin

After my father died, I found an unfinished manuscript he’d written that spelled out his observations of the human race. He saw how much of humankind’s unbroken cycle of suffering comes from our identification with the ways we are different — a German, a Jew, a gypsy — mostly destructive illusions created by a continuous cycle of conditioning.

My father observed how virulently contagious and hazardous these ideas can be. “The power of beliefs to create good and evil should never be underestimated,” he wrote. “Our beliefs become weapons we aim at other people and at ourselves. A threat to them can feel like a threat to our very lives. Just observe the willingness of so many people to blindly offer their lives in service of their beliefs. … Our demons are as old as history, and our inner world has hardly changed over the past centuries. … We are no closer to true insights about how to deal with the dark side of our nature.”

Now, we are contending with the dangerous coronavirus that does not differentiate by nationality, race, ethnicity or religion. It is spreading illness and death as well as fear, confusion, despair and isolation. We are all in this together, yet once again, we see hate rising — this time, against Asian Americans as some among us search for a scapegoat. We see the effects of the long history of racial injustice in the tragically high death rates of African Americans.

 We are all in this together, yet once again, we see hate rising — this time, against Asian Americans as some among us search for a scapegoat. We see the effects of the long history of racial injustice in the tragically high death rates of African Americans.

My father believed we are all children of a benevolent cosmos. “At the core of our being,” he wrote, “each of us is the divine individualized. We are all connected by love, and our heart as our center of gravity is always our truest and most helpful guide.”

Mendek would see this pandemic as a unique opportunity to recognize our interdependence and common humanity. On this Holocaust Day of Remembrance, let us come together with open hearts to journey toward a better tomorrow.

Myra Goodman is co-author with her late father, Mendek Rubin, of the recently released memoir “Quest for Eternal Sunshine: A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey From Darkness to Light.” She is the author of three cookbooks and co-founder of Earthbound Farm, the largest grower of organic produce in the world.