Memorial Day, 2011. To remember the people who sacrificed their lives for something bigger than themselves, I would like to include a picture of the American flag. (My computer won't let me add it to this page.) But I can never forget the race of people I belong to who made endless sacrifices, and for them I'm adding the yellow badge of shame that they were forced to wear on their coat sleeves. But I can't see it as a shameful symbol. We are still here.

Or are we? When my son Michael spent a summer in Prague he took a side trip to Merich, where the Reidbords, my mother's family, came from. I'll never, ever forget what he said to me about that visit: "Mom, in a way Hitler was successful. There are no Jews anywhere around there." He also learned from a record book in a synagogue that not all the Reidbord family escaped to America and then to Pittsburgh. Some of them, my relatives, were slaughtered along with the six million.

I love stories and I love to tell them. Here is a life-affirming story, something that happened to me in 1997 before we left the Philadelphia suburbs and moved north.

I was working as a counselor and I often visited my clients in their school environments. You can learn a lot that way, seeing your client separated from the family home. My client's history teacher was organizing a day-long trip to Washington, DC to visit the many museums and buildings there. We would start out at 5:00 AM and come back around midnight. This teacher very kindly offered me a space on the bus and I grabbed it.

We were supposed to stick together as a group and run madly through the DC area, trying to drink in as much history and culture as possible, then end the day at the National Holocaust Museum. I decided to forego this hectic day and spend the entire time available to me at the Holocaust Museum alone.

This was a wise decision and it was a day that changed me forever. I wish that every Jew could have a chance to spend a day in this hallowed place. There were three different film documentaries shown in sequence and I sat in the small, dark auditorium and watched them several times over. Holocaust survivors were interviewed and films, dark records of the people of our race being chased through the streets, driven from their homes, and smashed into boxcars on endless trains--I allowed all of it to pour over me. I sat in the dark; I was alone; I had nothing to distract me. We were told that some of the Holocaust survivors interviewed in these documentaries worked as volunteers in the Museum. They made themselves available so people like me could ask them questions.

I left the dark theatre and I stood and looked at the men and women who survived the Holocaust; they sat on chairs, behind counters. And I was afraid of them. I couldn't look at them.
What could I ask them? How did they get the courage to wake up in the morning and face each day?

Yes it was a painful day but not pointless. As much as I cried that day, I felt good in a way that I hadn't until then. A lot of my emotions derived from that day have no names. But one thing stands out: I felt gratitude towards the United States, as angry and pissed-off as I get at my own country I loved it that day and I still do.

Finally, I include the blue and white flag of the United Nations. My son worked for the UN as part of their peace-keeping forces beginning at the age of 19, many, many times going into impossibly terrifying situations and saving lives. So I know a little about how it feels to send a loved one into battle. My son was awarded the highest honor for bravery that the UN allows: the blue and white striped ribbon with the tiny palm leaf pin at the center.