Memories of the Holocaust

I can’t get the thought out of my mind—these young girls, the same age as my mother at the time, would have been my aunts had it not been for the German army’s determination to eliminate every trace of Jewish life in Europe. That thought haunts me more intensely now, perhaps because of the criminal events of October 7th in Israel. The images of that massacre brought back memories I never fully processed—memories that became unbearably vivid when I recently came across this photograph of Rivka and Rachel.

With white dresses my aunts Rick’s and Rachel

It’s a photo I had always known existed, but never held in my hands. As a documentarian, I’m drawn to the physical presence of memory. There’s something sacred about a photograph that survives what its subjects did not. In this case, the image captures three little girls in white dresses—two of them are Rivka and Rachel, daughters of Mirtche and Shoulk’ke Gurinski. Shoulk’ke was my grandfather’s sister. My mother still remembers sewing those dresses with her own mother in New York before sending them to Poland, along with a letter and the funds to help bring the family to safety. But between the taking of that photograph in Kamienets-Litovsk and its arrival in the United States, the Nazis arrived. And history closed in.

Kamyanyets (Kamienets) on the map

What followed is still uncertain. One version says the girls and their family were made to dig their own graves before being shot and buried in a mass grave that may never be found. Another suggests they were sent to Treblinka. Either way, this is the last image of the great-aunts I never had the chance to know.

In recent months, I’ve come to see how the same ideology that murdered Rivka and Rachel survived the war. Many of its followers scattered—some to Argentina and Brazil, others even to the United States—but several found refuge in the Middle East. Former SS officers became instructors in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The PLO, in great measure, was trained by these criminals. And Hamas has inherited their ideals.

The parallels between the Kamenets massacre and October 7th are chilling. The hate is the same. The cruelty—unforced and gleeful—is the same. We must look at these echoes not as accidents of history, but as consequences of an unfinished reckoning.