The Holocaust, those very words should send chills down the spine. The evil that was unleashed during those years are still with many, scars that will never heal, and a pain that will never vanish. The horrors, and atrocities that were committed, are almost too much for the human mind to comprehend.
With that being said, there is a photo that has been circulating and the reason why has touched the very heart, mind, and soul.
The Today show reports:
“Jessica Glatt should not, by all accounts, be here. For her to be born, both her grandfather and her grandmother had to survive the Holocaust — they miraculously did, by mere chance and fate. The fact that they went on to live long enough to see the birth of their great granddaughter, Glatt’s oldest child, Harli, was so significant that the family decided to commemorate their meeting with a picture of then 3-month-old Harli holding her great grandfather’s arm, his concentration camp tattoo still etched in his skin where it was drawn when he himself was barely a teenager.”
From Jessica Glatt’s story:
“My grandfather was the sole survivor of his immediate family. He spent the war in multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz, until he was eventually liberated from Ebensee. In addition to his parents and brother, virtually his entire extended family was murdered during the war. Years later, after much persuasion, he gave his testimony for the Shoah Foundation, as did my grandmother, also the sole survivor of her immediate family, who spent the war in hiding under extremely precarious conditions. Although I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the DVD copies of their testimonies, I do know some of the stories.”
She continues…
“Such as the time that my grandfather volunteered for a transport with the promise of better working and living conditions. While on the transport line, he was overcome with an enigmatic intuition that he needed to get off and, at the risk of being shot, he snuck back into his former line, only finding out later that those in the new line were taken into the forest and shot to death. Or the time when, on a cruel whim, the family hiding my grandmother threw her out of the house in the middle of the night. She spent the next harrowing hours hiding in the bushes from Nazi soldiers patrolling the streets only a few yards away, willing herself not to move a muscle and praying that she would not be discovered.”
Jessica Glatt with her husband, Brian, and children Harli, Skylar, and Carter.
“Since Glatt posted the photo on the Kveller Facebook page last year, it has received over 11K likes. Glatt wasn’t sure how her grandparents would react to the photo going viral, since they rarely talk about their experiences in the Holocaust, but they surprised her.
“They were so very moved by people’s reactions and were simply incredulous that the photo would evoke such a positive response and from the sheer number of people! The fact that all of the wonderful comments and likes were coming in from people of all different religions and ethnicities made it even more touching for them,” said Glatt.”
H/T: Today