The Jewish Talmud is the collection of centuries of Jewish oral law that has followed the teachings of the Jewish written law - the Torah – the first 5 books of the Jewish Bible.

A section of the Talmud called Tract Sanhedrin describes in detail the practice of witness testimony in court proceedings. The Talmud states that “He who saves a human being is regarded as if he has saved a whole world”.

The Talmud explains that statement by referring to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis. When God asks Cain about the whereabouts of his brother Abel, Cain responds : “Am I my brother’s keeper ?” To which God proclaims “The bloods of your brother are shouting to me from the ground.” “The bloods of your brother” - blood in plural. Why does God use the plural “bloods” to describe the killing of one human being ?

The Talmud further explains that by killing Abel, Cain had not only destroyed his own brother. By killing Abel, Cain has destroyed the entire future lineage of descendants that would have come from Abel. He had destroyed a whole humanity of people. A whole world.

By helping others to be saved, and by saving themselves from the horrors of destruction, our parents and those who came out of the abyss, have saved a whole world. The offspring of those who were saved. In the small victories of living to see another day, they saw a meaning. For them, a meaningful resistance in the face of evil has been to survive, and to give the gift of life to new generations.

The stories of my parents had originated in the vibrant rural Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.

Situated 50 miles north of Majdanek, and 50 miles south of Treblinka, the town of Lukow Poland was the birthplace of my father Shaul. In an area that would become the epicenter of what the Nazi Germans had called “Endlösung der Juden frage”, “The final solution to the Jewish question”.

In a remote part of Northern Romania, the town of Storozhynets was the birthplace of my mother Lily. In an area that would become the scene of one of the largest scale organized destructions of Jewish lives perpetrated by a host nation against its own Jewish population during the Holocaust. Romania ranks first among Holocaust perpetrator countries other than Nazi Germany.

A singular historical event had been detrimental to the stories of both of my parents – the Molotov–Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact that was signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939. The two nations had agreed not to attack one another, and in a secret protocol, had agreed to divide Poland, Romania, and other countries to spheres of influence between them. Poland was to be divided between the two. It was also stipulated that Germany would not interfere with the Soviet Union's actions towards Northern Romania.

My father had joined the Polish army at the age of 17, and when the war broke out, he was in Western Poland, near the border with Germany. A soldier fighting the Nazi Germans as they invaded Poland. Having been wounded by German fire, he had returned to his hometown of Lukow. On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Red Army launched an invasion of Poland from the east. Several days later, the Soviets entered Lukow.

On September 28, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a second supplemental protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, called “German Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty”. This second protocol stipulated that the demarcation line between Nazi German occupied Poland and Soviet occupied Poland is moved to the east, from the San River to the Bug River. So at a stroke of a pen, Lukow had moved from the Soviet occupied zone, to the Nazi German occupied zone. The Soviet Army had retreated from Lukow on that same day.

During this short window of about a week of Soviet occupation, a group of 300 Jews, mostly young men, were allowed by the Soviets to board a train that would take them to Brest Litovsk, a city on the Polish-Soviet border. The Jews in this group were by and large the only survivors from the Jewish community of Lukow. My father was one of them.

Following the Evian conference in 1938, and to deter Jewish refugees in Europe from heading east towards the Soviet Union, Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union gave an order that anyone who tried to cross the border into the Soviet Union would be considered a spy. So as my father crossed the border into the Soviet Union, he had been detained and sent to the Pechora Gulag in Siberia.

In Northern Romania, when the war broke out, the Soviets had given an ultimatum to the Romanian government to transfer control of Northern regions of Romania to the Soviets. The Romanian government agreed to withdraw from the territories to avoid a military conflict. The Soviet army had marched into Storozhynets, where my mother’s family had lived. During the Soviet occupation that lasted 1 year, young Jewish men had joined the Soviet army to fight the Nazi Germans. Among those who joined the fight were 3 of my uncles. The 3 of them were killed on the battlefields of the Eastern Front.

Back in Poland, my paternal family had been largely destroyed by the Nazi Germans in the gas chambers of Treblinka and Majdanek, and at the Miedzyrzec Ghetto.

In Northern Romania, the Soviet occupation had ended after 1 year. The area where my maternal family had lived had been reoccupied by Romania as part of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. In Romania at that time, a new fascist regime came to power that was fully aligned with the Nazi regime and its ideology. Driven by antisemitism that was deeply rooted in Romania, and the full adoption of Nazi ideology, the Romanians had accused the Jews that were under Soviet occupation of being collaborators.

The Romanian regime then embarked on a brutal campaign of destroying the Jewish communities of Northern Romania. Some of the Jews were destroyed in their communities. Others such as my mother’s family, had been deported to Transnistria. Many perished on the way. The remaining family ended up at the Bershad Ghetto where over the course of months and years, my maternal family had been largely destroyed by disease, freezing, and starvation.

At the end of the war, my father had returned from the Soviet Gulag to his hometown in Poland, and found out that his family had been largely destroyed. He proceeded to a Displaced Persons camp near Heidelberg Germany, and from there to a port near Genoa Italy where he boarded a ship to pre-statehood Israel. The ship had been stopped on the way by the British Navy and all on board were moved to a detention camp in Cyprus.

My mother together with a few survivors from her family, had been liberated by the Soviet army that conquered Transnistria. Later on, they would board a ship out of Europe in Constanza Romania.

Rising from the ashes of death and destruction, Shaul and Lily chose life.

They got married in Israel in 1953, and gave the gift of life to my brother Dov and me.

We grew up insulated from the history of our family. When my parents wanted to talk about the past, they would speak in Yiddish so that we the kids would not understand.

It is 1994. My mother passed away years before. The stories about our family had been revealed to us by my father, shortly before he passed away.

It would take years of assembling the pieces of the stories, documenting the lives lost, and eventually coming to terms with the loss and the memories, culminating in putting it all in writing as part of the Shoah Legacy Writers group.