Yom HaShoah in Israel

( Apr. 14, 2026 / JNS ) Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. At 10 a.m. a shrill blast penetrates the atmosphere. All traffic, all the people of the nation state of Israel, grind to a halt. At this moment the entire country stops to pay tribute to the memory of the Holocaust.

My husband and I travelled to the memorial for Zaglembie victims of the Holocaust. We were given an amazing tour of this region, by Zak Jeffar, in an area dedicated to their memory by the Jewish National Fund. This area of rich and vibrant Polish Jewry is on the German border and devoid of Jewish life.

At this site, about 100,000 of the 3.3 million Polish Jews lived and flourished before the Holocaust. Jews and had lived there for over 800 years, making it 10 percent of the population throughout Europe. How many American Jews can say that we have had our roots in this country for 800 years?

Jewish life in Poland was complex and rich, a mosaic of Jewish life. Before the Holocaust, they had hopes and dreams of the future. There were secularist and traditionalists, Bundists and Zionists, romanticists, idealists and pragmatists.

In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.  The Nazis relished the idea of obliterating the entire Jewish population of Poland. Relative to Germany, where there were merely 500,000  to 525,000 Jews living, the Nazis had years of a steady diet of antisemitic indoctrination. They vehemently savored the idea of slaughtering the Jews of Poland.

Their first action was to gather all the Jews of the area into their synagogue. A maid working in a castle wrote a letter that she heard all the Jews talking. Then a few blasts. And then complete and total silence.

Jews who remained alive were taken into the Lodz Ghetto. Several thousand Jews were incarcerated in Radogoszcz prison on the outskirts of town. Sometime after that, at around November 9^th , 1939 the cattle cars began arriving and the Jews were rounded up and taken to concentration camps in Germany.

The enormous suffering these people underwent could not be overstated. Women, aware of their fate on route to places such as Auschwitz, tried to throw their babies off the train, thinking someone with a heart might adopt him or her.

There were a few tiny lights in this overwhelming darkness. One such light was Sister Gertruda Stanisława Marciniak, a nun who had been arrested at the beginning of the German occupation. She had a heightened moral compass and refused to let the Nazis murder Jewish children. She established an orphanage and forged birth certificates for the Jewish children she was sheltering, knowing that this was punishable by death. She also used this home to hide Jewish resistance fighters.

Dan Landsberg, who was hidden in this home as a child described how the Nazis invaded the orphanage in search of Jewish children; how Sister Gertruda hid him under her habit. She stated that “Once a child had come to me, their fate is my fate too.”

But the numbers were very few. Only one per cent of Polish Jews survived the years of the Shoah.

Four who kept the hope, the Tikvah, alive, dreamt of going to Israel. They were Ana Gertner of Zaglebie, Estusia Wajcblum of Warszawa, Regina Safirsztajn of Zaglabie and Roza Robota of Ciechacow.

All were executed on January 6^th, 1945, just four months before the Nazis surrendered. Just before she was hung, Roza Roberta clearly uttered “Chazak Vi Amatz”, (Be strong and of good courage.)

There were brilliant mathematicians, physicists, and Talmudists. There were Orthodox rabbis and secular poets and playwrights.

Each one of these lives, and the entire 6 million, was a universe. The state of Israel is here today so this will never happen again. In our lifetime, our children’s lifetime and our those of our grandchildren.

Sarah Stern is the Founder and President of EMET, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a Middle East think tank and policy institute which educates policymakers in Washington, DC.