I am not a Holocaust survivor in the classic sense. Neither my body nor my person experienced the horrors of the Concentration camps and the systematic torture and wanton murders of the Nazi killing machine.

 

But borrowing from the Biblical statement apropos the situation after the tenth plague that hit the errant, cruel Egyptian people of the period of the Exodus, "she-ein bayit she-ein sham meit", that there was no Egyptian household that didn't experience the results of this plague that claimed the lives of first born males,  all sides of the drama are ultimately touched and scorched by any widespread experience of suffering and loss. 

 

The collateral damage; the emotional scars and sense of deep loss reach well into the soul and psyche of successive generations. Evil has tentacles that hold our hearts and heads hostage from the untold scope of its reach against its innocent victims and their offspring.

 

While I lost relatives in Europe, some whose names I will never know, there is one loss that figures largely in our family's history and that has a claim on us that can never be released.

 

My father was one of three sons to his parents Abraham and Lea Zierler. One brother died by drowning at age 14 before my father was born. Another brother Isaac B, affectionately referred to as Bucky, after his childhood hero Buck Jones, was a Flying Officer—a navigator—with the Royal Canadian Air Force. A brilliant student and accomplished athlete at the University of Toronto, coming from a modest life in his hometown of Sarnia, in Southwest Ontario, he graduated in uniform and ultimately was deployed for service in the European theatre of war. 

 

He survived being shot down once. But on April 10, 1945, which corresponds to the Hebrew calendar date of the 27th of Nissan, his Lancaster bomber was hit in a dogfight over Leipzig, and he and his crew were killed. We heard eyewitness testimony from a fellow in a plane behind theirs. We are told that it was one of the last sorties into German territory as the war drew to a close and a historically significant and successful one at that. But it took precious lives in its wake, including that of my would-be uncle.

 

He was reported missing and confirmation of his death only came months later in October. What a long and painful wait it was for my grandparents and father, hoping against despair that he was alive and perhaps healing in a military hospital somewhere. Instead, his body once discovered was laid to rest in a military cemetery just outside Berlin where it remains today.