Tonight and tomorrow the Jewish community celebrates Yom HaShoah (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day).
This important day of commemoration takes place every year in Israel and elsewhere to mark the heroism of those who died and those who put up a stand against the Nazis and their collaborators during the Shoah.
The date in the Hebrew calendar is Nisan 27, which this year is April 12. The date was chosen by the new-born Jewish State of Israel to commemorate the period between the freedom celebration of Pesach and Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel's Independence Day, which takes place a week later.
Yom HaShoah starts the previous night, like Shabbat and all Jewish festivals. It is marked by the lighting of a memorial candle, and the recital of modern poems, such as 'I believe in the sun', inscribed on the wall of his cell by a Jewish prisoner of the Nazis.
Here is the song sung recently by the Alma High School Choir, Arkansas, USA.
Arkansas has hardly any Jews (0.06 per cent of the population at the last count), but the song has touched their hearts and is the most evocative of all the renditions I've heard. I have also chosen this choir because Alma means 'world' in Aramaic and is the name of my granddaughter.
Throughout her life it is Alma (currently aged seven) who will be carrying the torch for my grandmother, her great-great-grandmother, Regina. Regina was one of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews who perished or were transported to Treblinka and were exterminated there.
One day I will teach Alma about Regina, which means 'Queen', and after whom I am named, and also my aunt Irene, after whom I am also named. Irene married Charles, my father's brother, whose name was passed onto my own brother. Aunt Irene and Uncle Charles were both exterminated by the Nazis and their Polish allies.
Out of the entire family only my father Max survived. Parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins and all other relations were brutally exterminated in Poland by the Nazis and their East European collaborators, by their former friends and colleagues who had been on first-name terms.
My dad had been appointed a judge by his twenties, and was also a member of the Polish national table tennis team.
But in 1938, aged 26, he saw the writing on the wall for the Jews of Poland, who comprised 10 per cent of the population and had lived there for centuries. In Warsaw and other big towns they had comprised at least 30 per cent of the population, and in some places, even 50 per cent or more.
Knowing what was to happen, Dad therefore upped and left for Vilna in Lithuania. From there he travelled via Russia, Siberia and Japan to Canada. There he joined the Black Watch Scottish regiment. He hoped to access Europe once again so that he could rescue his mother Regina from the Warsaw Ghetto. But by then it was too late. She, my grandmother, and all his siblings and other relations had been exterminated.
My dad eventually settled permanently in this country, first in Scotland and then in Prestwich, Greater Manchester. He married my mother (also a Polish refugee who managed to escape from the Nazis and their collaborators in France). And that's why I'm English and not Canadian (or even Polish). My two children have chosen to live in Israel and we all have joint Israeli and British nationality.
In Israel on Holocaust Day, it is customary for sirens to sound at 10 am. Everyone stops what they are doing and is silent for two minutes to remember the dead and the living. I remember the day well in 2007 when I was living in Haifa.
A group of us were travelling from Haifa to Nahariya in the north of the country. The siren went. We were arguing about something or other. We stopped. The car stopped. We jumped out of the car. All the other cars on the motorway had stopped. No accidents, no calamities. We all prayed silently in the middle of the north Israel highway (think M1 with anarchic driving most of the time). After two minutes, we jumped back into our cars, resumed our argument where we had left off and carried on driving to Naharia. And everyone else did likewise.
This year, Yom HaShoah is commemorated in Jerusalem by a remarkable concert comprising survivors, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Here is their song which celebrates life, as they look forward to next week and the 70th anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel where most Holocaust survivors and their families have made their home, simply glad to be alive.
