Holocaust Remembrance Day

Seth Siegel tells a remarkable story about Yom HaShoah.

At a recent parents' meeting at the progressive Abraham Joshua Heschel School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, two fathers of young daughters introduced themselves and learned, remarkably, that both of their fathers had been born in the same small Ukrainian town.

The Heschel parents, an American and an Israeli, realized that, since there was only a single Nazi transport from the town, both of their fathers were undoubtedly on the same train bound for an extermination camp in October 1942. The American told of his then 19-year-old father, who escaped by jumping through a plank he had dislodged from above a window in the car. His father, telling the story, always added that, before he jumped, he pushed a boy up and out through that loosened plank.

The Israeli instantly knew who the boy was, for his own father had always told of how there was an opening too high for him to reach--he was then age 11--and of how an older boy lifted him up and pushed him out. The two boys never saw each other again, but each, miraculously, survived the war by hiding in Ukrainian farms and forests. Now their children, so far in time and space from these events, came to learn that their daughters are in the same class.