Survival and endurance on display at Glen Cove Holocaust museum event

Gilda Zirinsky’s childhood memories remain fresh more than eight decades later: the sound of Nazi warplanes over her family home in Belgium; with her parents and extended family, trying to stay ahead of Adolph Hitler's annihilation of Jews in Europe.

Now 89, Zirinsky shared her story of survival as a 4-year-old in Europe during the late 1930s with about 80 others Thursday evening at the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County in Glen Cove. The group gathered for Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Zirinsky lit the first of six candles, each representing one million Jews killed during the Holocaust, at the start of the ceremony.

 "We were the lucky ones," she told Newsday of her family. "We did not have to deal with the Nazis directly, but they were chasing us."

The annual memorial falls on the 27th day of Nissan, the first month of the Hebrew calendar, between Passover and Israel’s Independence Day, as well as around the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a show of Jewish resistance to the Nazis in Poland in the spring of 1943, according to Donna Rosenblum, the center’s education director.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed by the United Nations on Jan. 27 each year, coincides with the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in 1945.

On Thursday evening, Rabbi Michael S. Churgel, of the North Country Reform Temple of Glen Cove, said at the event that the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas militants on Israel will be a generation-defining event, just as the Holocaust was.

"In the face of the unthinkable and the wake of the ungraspable, Jews find comfort in being with one another," Churgel told the group at the ceremony. "To be Jewish, is to remember ... This evening, we fulfill the mitzvah of remembrance."

After the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and the abduction of 251 more, Israel's military responded. More than 51,000 Palestinians have died since in the ongoing war with Hamas, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The health ministry makes no distinction between civilians and combatants.

During another war, more than 80 years ago, Zirinsky told the group, she could hear the German planes in Belgium, where she was born in 1935, as her parents frantically packed suitcases with clothes, identifying documents and chocolates for her. The extended family of 14 hopped aboard their first of several westbound trains headed to France.

On one train, French soldiers ordered her father and two of her male cousins to join Polish forces fighting the Nazis. They had "no qualms" about this task, Zirinsky said, but she cried as her father departed.

In France, her uncle found work as a butcher to support her aunt, mother and all the children. Upon hearing word that some soldiers were being relieved after France surrendered and sent on trains, Zirinsky’s mother acted on hope and a hunch that her father would arrive at a particular train station. Her mother was right, and they were reunited, an act she called "a miracle."

With AP