A day of honouring my ancestry

How I now wished I'd shared the story of where I came from

But you don’t look Polish. You’re too dark. More like Greek, Italian, Spanish, from the Mediterranean region perhaps…?

This has been a common reaction to telling someone that my father was born in Poland, as were my grandparents.

I never bothered to explain that it’s because there aren’t many Polish descendants like me left. That 90% of them perished in the Holocaust. 90% of Polish Jewry and blood lines lost…forever.

Neither would I bother to explain that Poland wasn’t my ancestors first home, it was the place they escaped to after being expelled from their homeland…and probably a number of other pit-stops along the way.

I never explained because it didn’t feel important. Or necessary.

But I can’t tell you how many times over the last six months I’ve wished that I had told that story. I wonder if it would’ve helped, even a little, disrupt the narratives going around at the moment about Jewish people and their connection to Israel.

I feel my look, including my non-typical Polish dark curly hair and colouring, is a blend of all the countries my forefathers and mothers walked through or rather ran to. My outer appearance is a living and breathing example of our past, our challenges, and most importantly our will to keep on living.

My inner resilience to life is also something I’m grateful for inheriting. A no-give up attitude, a willingness to endure, face my demons and grow through it all.

Jewish people could’ve played the victim countless times in history. Particularly after the Holocaust. But they didn’t. They found a way to move on, rebuild their lives in countries unfamiliar (again) to them, with different cultures and religions, and, dare I say it, learnt to thrive. This is because the number one thing valued in Judaism is life. This comes before everything else.

All of us second and third generation children of migrants, have blended into our new countries, probably the reason why in the most part no one even knows I’m Jewish when they meet me. We learnt to integrate and assimilate while keeping a connection to our roots.

Recently I heard a guy I follow say that Judaism is essentially a construct that helped keep the dispersed Hebrews around the world connected in some way. It’s not entirely correct but as a non-religious person this resonated with me. It gave us roots and a thread to unleash new wings and build new lives upon — traditions, language, art, culture, stories. And connected us to those who have always remained in Israel.

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day - a day when we honour the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. We light one candle for each one million.

The Holocaust has been misappropriated in recent years in many ways. It’s been denied and dismissed. It’s also become the subject of a number of fictional books and films, even love stories. But it was no love story. Talk to a real survivor and you may get tales of courage, tenacity and faith, but no romance.

Today I honour my namesake, Sara, my paternal great-grandmother and the rest of my grandfather’s family who were shot at gun-point and buried in a mass grave outside their home town. My grandfather was the only survivor of his family.

Today I honour my maternal grandfather’s family that never made it out to Australia either. His mother, brother and sister taken to concentration camps and murdered.

Today I honour every other child, woman and man who was persecuted, shot, gassed and burnt to ash for no other reason than being Jewish.