![]() ![]() US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Alfred Münzer ![]() But while I was kept safe by the Indonesian Dutch Madna family and their Muslim nanny, Mima Saïna, who adopted me and loved me like one of their own, my sisters were denounced to the Nazis, imprisoned in Scheveningen in The Hague, Netherlands, deported to Westerbork, and then sent to their death at Auschwitz-a fate they shared with 1.5 million other children killed by the Nazis. Like me, they had been entrusted to a Christian family by my parents to safeguard them from the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators. My sisters, Eva, seven, and Leah, five, were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau on February 11, 1944. The kaddish makes no reference to mourning but is a reaffirmation of our faith in the Almighty despite our loss. I learned the words of the kaddish sometime in 1950 when I was eight or nine, shortly after my mother found out the precise date of my father’s death-July 25, 1945, which translated to the Hebrew date 15 Av-in what had been the Ebensee concentration camp. Traditionally, we light a candle at home and recite the kaddish in the synagogue in their memory. Yahrzeit is the Jewish yearly observance of a loved one’s death. ![]()
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