Hold on to One Name Among the Six Million

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is hard, if not impossible, to comprehend the enormity of the Holocaust’s devastation. Centers of Jewish culture were destroyed. European Jewry’s vitality was decimated. Six million Jews were murdered.

And so, each year I choose to focus on one story. I choose to take one person’s trauma and loss to heart. Here is Rachel Katz’s story.

Rachel was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1937 to Fanny and Benjamin Laufmann who recently immigrated from Bulgaria. Her mother was a seamstress, and her father worked as a merchant and glazier.

Rachel was in nursery school when the Nazis occupied Belgium in May 1940. In June 1940 Benjamin was arrested and sent to a labor camp in France. From there he was sent to the Mechelen transit camp in Belgium and from there deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was murdered in November 1942.

Fanny moved her four young children from one hiding place to another. She obtained false papers from a neighbor, Maria Lubben, who also hid the family in her own home. For several months she hid Rachel and two of her siblings in a convent.

When the Gestapo’s raids intensified the three children returned to Antwerp and lived in hiding with their mother. Belgium was liberated in September 1944. At the age of twenty, Rachel made her way to Israel. There she married and raised two children, and later three grandchildren and most recently two great grandchildren.

This year she was honored to serve as one of the six torchlighters at Yad Vashem’s annual ceremony.

In May 2004 Maria Lubben was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. She died in 1989.

Rachel remarked, “I have two children, three grandchildren and two great grandchildren who are my world. They give me a sense of victory.”

Rachel survived.

In 1939 there were an estimated 15.3 million Jews living throughout the world. Today, there an estimated 15.8 million

Millions of Jews did not survive the Holocaust.

I hold on to one name.

It is that of Rachel’s father Benjamin Laufmann.