There is a photograph sitting on my desk as I write this. It is from 1948, the year Israel declared itself into existence and was immediately fighting five armies for the right to keep existing.
They are all smiling—leaving behind a continent of murdered families, and all that cannot be said.
Edna, Sam, and Harry on the deck of the TSS Olympia, Haifa Harbor — September 1, 1960 (Brill family archive).
The photograph is not a good one.
Blurred. Crowded. Taken on a sun-struck deck in Haifa, strangers…
Why Jews Still Fight for Home — and What America Owes
I have a photograph of my father-in-law standing alone in a desert, holding a rifle. On the back, in Edna’s handwriting, it says: “Harry Brill, 1948, Israel — in the Army.”
He survived the Holocaust by hiding in the forests of eastern Galicia. In 1947…
Kloster Indersdorf (Bavaria) and Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot (Western Galilee, Israel).
A twelfth-century monastery transformed into a survivor-run orphanage for Jewish children after the Holocaust, and the kibbutz founded by those survivors, where the world’s first permanent Holocaust Museum was established.
Join the Int’l March of the Living proudly with Author Janet Bond Brill for a Meaningful Conversation about her new Holocaust Memoir, Little Edna’s War, moderated by Dr. Michael Berenbaum.