Remembering Beila and Wolf

Yom HaShoah, Mountain Gazette 203, and my family's Holocaust story.

I find it difficult to think of today as the day to remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. It’s something I think about most days. It’s something children and grandchildren of survivors—and most Jews, really—are programmed never to forget. The great Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote about this in The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago: “It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized that there was an official Holocaust Remembrance Day, because it always felt just like a rolling, year-round thing.”

But I do think this day is important—to remind us to grieve, to remind most people who don’t think about the Holocaust daily that we cannot let it happen again. Everyone, not just Jews, has a duty not to ignore it, especially now in this increasingly violent, antisemitic, and xenophobic world we live in.

Today is Yom HaShoah—not Remembrance Day, but similar—specifically to commemorate the six million Jews killed by the Nazis. Four from my family, who I write about in Mountain Gazette 203, are my great-grandaunt, Beila; her husband, Wolf Engelard; and their daughters, Rachel and Rosa.

Beila and Wolf at their wedding in Belgium in September 1935.

The story is also about my grandfather and great-grandparents who survived the Holocaust, and it’s about my journey retracing their paths across Europe as far-right nationalism has a modern-day resurgence.

The magazine is being packed in mailers at this very moment. If you want to read the story but missed subscribing to Mountain Gazette in time to receive it, stay tuned. There may be another opportunity.