Scars - A personal reflection International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025

I have a scar on my forehead.

My parents had much deeper scars.

I got my scar on an endless Shabbas afternoons in the middle of summer. “Shabbas” is Hebrew for sabbath, and as religious Jews, we observed Shabbos every Saturday. Shabbos  meant  no bike riding, no TV, no turning on and off lights, no playing any games that had buzzers or beepers. We couldn’t even play ball in the street. Pretty much the only thing to do on Shabbas was to wait for it to end.

Every Shabbas afternoon, like clockwork, my parents, some aunts and uncles, and other hangers-on sat at this long wooden picnic table on our back porch, where they’d drink warm tea and nibble my mother’s sugar cookies, and talk and talk and talk. My parents were different from the other adults at that table. My parents almost fit into the outside world, they barely had accents because they came to this country when they were kids. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know that my father was fourteen when he left Vienna via the kindertransport – a train that took Jewish children to safety from Nazi-occupied countries – or that my mother was only eleven when her father figured out how to slip his children out of Germany through the cracks that formed on the night when Nazis ran amok smashing and terrorizing everything and everyone Jewish. Knowing their history was like breathing, it was who I was, just like how I always knew that I was Jewish.

But there was something about the other adults at that table. Maybe it was their drab clothes even on the sunniest days, or how no matter how hot it was, they always wore these long sleeves, in order to hide those tattooed blue digits on their forearms– the ones I figured were  phone numbers until I learned that they were expiration dates the Nazis inked into their skin when they were forced into Concentration Camps.

Even when those older adults smiled their eyes still looked sad, and their smiles were always a little too eager. They’d pinch our cheeks and pat our heads with these gnarled fingers, and in tortured English sprinkled with German and Yiddish they asked us the same questions every single week, about school work and grades. I got the feeling that no matter what we said, they’d be delighted. Those old people hung onto our every word, nodding, beaming encouragement, drinking in our childish observations as if we were dispensing profound rabbinic wisdom.

Somehow we understood that we were the physical embodiment of every hope and ambition that sustained these broken people who lived with a no-frills approach to survival. As we marched, unquestioning, diligently, from strength to strength, we were their triumphant ‘I told you sos' validating and restoring their dignity.

 Anyway, on this particular Saturday, my cousin Ushie and I were hot and bored after the benign cross-examination. So, even though we were dressed for Shabbos, me in a starched and scratchy dress, Ushie in long pants and hard leather shoes, we ventured off the porch to see what was going on with the kids who lived on the other end of the street. The not Jewish kids, the ones who had Christmas trees and ate big macs and who had grandparents who spoke normal English. Kids with names like the ones in our school books, Dick, and Jane and Sally.  Not like our weird names, Cimmy, Rifky, Ushie, Matty and Naftali

But that day, those kids – never  really my friends but not my enemies either, picked up sticks and pebbles from the street and starting chasing us, yelling, “Let’s get Cimmy Snotgrass and Ushie Tushie. Cimmy Snotgrass, Ushie Tushie.”

I ran, hearing them behind me, yelling my strange name, laughing at my fussy clothes, the weird rules I had to follow. I didn’t pay attention to where I was running, I just had to get somewhere safe. I kept going and going, panting, charging straight up the porch steps, and smack into the brick wall at the corner.

            That’s when I finally stopped, holding my hand up to my forehead, smelling then feeling warm blood oozing onto my fingers.

My mother yelled, jumping up from the picnic table. “It’s her eye.  It’s her eye.”

They crowded around me, those women in their blue and black dresses, their thick stockings and clunky shoes, those men, short and bald, some round, others thin as sticks.  They put cold compresses on my forehead and told me to lie down, to get up, to walk around, to be still.

They couldn’t agree on anything, but they all wrung their hands and shook their heads in the exact same way. They were more afraid than I was. Not for my eye, or the small scar that would form on my forehead. They were afraid because now I knew. I’d seen – and now I would understand, even if only a teeny bit, their deeper scars, the ones they tried so hard but still couldn’t protect us from.

Years later, if  I was asked about that scar, I’d shrug and say something like, “I was a kid, I was a klutz, I didn’t look where I was going.” But today I’m not a kid, and especially today, as we remember the horrors of our past, I can’t afford, we can’t afford, to not look where we’re going, or to ignore what’s right in front us. Never again is now.