On the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 

It’s a beautiful spring evening. The air is clear and good, warm and pleasant. I'm walking back from POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, along the street that connects the past with the present: the Ghetto with Normal. 

I pass by people in the street, people on cell phones, people walking dogs. Cars are parked at their apartments, and you can see the flicker of television shows through the open windows, see the curtains flutter in the evening breeze on this beautiful night.

On the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising I ask myself if its inmates ever felt normal. If it was possible to feel anything as mundane as a spring evening's breeze while you were watching your loved ones starving to death, and terror and chaos was everywhere. 

How could there be normal when you were deteriorating from one day to the next? From one beautiful spring night made by God and delivered to humanity to the next? How did you know if you were going to be the one chosen for survival - to live with the ghosts of your friends, loved ones and  community forever, never to have a peaceful moment, or if you were destined to be tortured and then murdered, or to be blessed with a quick death at the hands of a merciful Nazi criminal.

A diminishing number of American young adults don't know much about the Holocaust. The tides of time and memory are eroding. Even in this era of social media, the Cloud and the ability to retain unimaginable amounts of data, it seems the martyred are destined to be forgotten.  

On this beautiful spring night there are many people in this world who are blissfully ignorant.

As I stroll down the newly paved street in a city that has undergone tremendous renewal, I am thinking about that fateful night of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which happened under my feet, 75 years ago. 

Many people in this world get to walk around on a beautiful spring night like this oblivious to the story of the Holocaust. They are having dinner, or watching television, or skyping with friends, or having a beer. Are they the lucky ones - the Great Unburdened?

Or is it me, the child of Holocaust survivors, who is the lucky one?